Grumblican

• If you are a free site that caters to homeschoolers and "teachers of all kinds," you should really give everyone some notice when you decide to become a pay site. Otherwise, some will drop you like a hot potato.
• If, for example, you give no notice whatsoever, and some unsuspecting mama, who has bookmarked your site because the spelling lists are good but has never even looked at the rest of your site, is suddenly confronted with the fact that even though she just used your site last week and everything was free, but now is not free, you will get blogged about.
• If you have a poor-me explanation of why you are suddenly, overnight-like, charging for your site, you can anticipate that people are going to dump your site from their bookmark lists. No notice about a major change like that is insulting. You need to trust that people will continue to use your site after you require payment. Updating folks on Facebook (a possibility that I am entertaining you did) is not enough; not everyone (gasp!) is on Facebook. You need to fully disclose that information on your site, all over the danged place, if you expect folks to pony up. Offer them 5 free downloads of their choice, or something for their loyalty, but don't be surprised if they don't take you up on it. Expecting sympathy-loyalty from Internet consumers is hilarious.
• $20 a year for so-so worksheets is kinda silly. If there weren't hundreds of other sites, some with customizable worksheets of superior quality out there, you'd probably get my money. But since I'm still printing the darned things myself, I'm going to keep my money in my pocket and use other free sites. Yours was a convenience that I can easily replace elsewhere. Also, because of the lack of notice about your site change, I don't trust that after you nab five or six hundred dollars, you won't belly up and disappear.

*Why am I even bothering to complain? I'm not arguing that it wasn't this guy's right to charge for his site and products, I'm arguing that he did it in a way that casts suspicion on his site and makes folks like me annoyed that we have to go out once again and search for 2nd and 4th grade spelling lists. If your site is a beta preview, then say so....then people know that eventually it will become a pay site and prepare for that eventuality. Or if circumstances force you to become a pay site suddenly, you really should forewarn your potential customer base, or give them some freebies that have value to them...or you may lose them altogether.
**Why not post the site's name? I thought about it, but I decided that while it's fine for me to complain on my personal blog about an experience I had, it would be libelous to chant the site's name all over. While I didn't personally see any notice on his site about an upcoming change, it's a tiny possibility that there was something I missed. I'd hate for the guy to lose business because of my big mouth. Ultimately, internet purchases of downloadable content are always risky, and it's up to the individual to decide whether they trust a site with "a year's worth of access," when in reality that site could disappear next week without a trace. Caveat emptor!