What kind of communities are you a part of that you pay for? All the best ones that I can think of have never involved money moving around at all--participation makes a community, not money.
I'm part of a community theatre that charges members $20 per year. The membership fee makes you legally a shareholder in the organisation for that year, with voting rights at an annual election where new management is voted in.
There's usually only 50 or so people who vote (most members can't be bothered), so $20 gets you a substantial amount of influence if you can be bothered.
Last year's management are required to step down before the vote starts, making them regular members with a single vote during the re-election process. Usually it's mostly the same people voted back in, but there's always two or three new faces each year.
"Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private"
I have been paying for wiki hosting in the past to create a community (I prefer open source so I've created a much used open source Wiki engine that I and others used for hosting their communities[1]), I've payed for Discourse community hosting, I pay for newsletter hosting [2]. The providers in these cases could not remove me from "my" communities, they could not take "my" (our) content.
[1] One was called Javangelist, long gone but funnily you can find links to it on C2 https://wiki.c2.com/?IcebergSecret [2] I create a CTO community around https://www.amazingcto.com/cto-newsletter/
Committee-run churches are this. Obviously not all churches fit the bill, but many do. Also other many other sort of traditional 'IRL' clubs that collect dues to pay expenses but are run by volunteers elected by the members.