Why on earth does it feel sketchy to you. As far as I can tell this service will be devoid of adverts and tracking, which means that it will be entirely funded by subscribers. You can't really expect him to buy all the servers and bandwidth and provide it all to you for nothing out of his own pocket. That's just stupid. It seems to me the idea is that early access subscribers pay for the initial equipment. They then release an initial block of free accounts. As they get more paying subscribers they can invest in more infrastructure and release more free accounts.

If they were just to give accounts out free immediately they would be inundated and the servers might not be able to cope.

This allows them to grow the service organically with paying subscribers supporting the "freeloaders".

Hope that clears it up.

Just say that up front. Before i put in an email address.

Current wait list: 60,000 people (estimated hold time 30 days) but you can jump the queue for $12.99/mo or $100/yr.

Done. Honest. Transparent.

The site's current account flow is infected with dark patterns and turns off those familiar with them, like me.

Yeah. I knew (from TFA) that there was a charge to jump the queue. But there's no mention of that on the signup page. And no mention that they don't accept ~anonymous payments.