I'll definitely experiment some with the pricing as well.
The account permissions are needed since it uses a SyncAdapter to sync the progress data between multiple devices, so if you have both a phone and a tablet you can sync your progress between them. The sync functionality is also used to fetch updates to the word list when I correct some translations etc on the server side. Unfortunately, there's no way to use the Android sync functionality without also setting up an account (as far as I could see), and I didn't want to implement all that by myself.