Just to be clear, $20/year is roughly one Starbucks drink per fiscal quarter.
Even if it was $10/year, people would still cry foul.
There was a time where "willing to pay for access" was a decent spam control mechanism, but that was long ago
As you say, those coffees seem to keep on selling…
If on the other hand, you spent the $200k on leasing an omg.lol domain in perpetuity, you could hold the domain for 10 millenniums.
If we were in the Dune universe, that means your omg.lol domain would expire roughly around the same time as the Butlerian Jihad starts and the thinking machines are overthrown.
X is just one cappuccino, Y is just 3.5 bagels, Z costs not more than a pint, A costs almost as much as a nice meal … and so on. God's sake! :)