So SmileBASIC 4 itself costs 25 USD (40 AUD).
A server ticket costs 5 USD (9 AUD). Despite the name, these tickets never expire or get used up. How these work is as follows:
- If you have 0 tickets, you can only download once every 8 hours, and you can't upload anything.
- If you have n tickets, where n > 0, then you have unlimited downloads, and can upload 10*n projects at once. (Note that you can take down old projects to make room for new ones.)
Personally speaking, unless you really need to upload a lot of projects at once (and 10 slots goes further than you might think), you really only need one ticket.
The reason this server ticket system exists is because SmileBoom is a pretty small company (their site lists 8.2 million yen in capital, about 76,000 USD or 120,000 AUD), and this helps offset server costs.
In any case, if you still find this system distasteful, there's nothing stopping you from continuing to do it the old way, manually typing in programs by hand. That said, I don't think it's so unreasonable to ask for a few bucks for server access, especially as a one-time fee.
(Note also that originally the plan was for SmileBASIC 4 to only be sold as a bundle with one ticket. The standalone version was added because there were issues with it showing up in the eShop properly otherwise.)
EDIT: One more note: this is a project limit, but you can have multiple files in a project, and the maximum project upload size is 20 MB. As you probably know, text doesn't take up much space, so you can cram a LOT of small programs into one project if you need to.