In July of 2012 I established my site as a paywall with a time delay for all the articles to be free (originally 7 days, revised down to 3 days and then 2 days and moving around randomly since then depending on my mood). It was $4 month, or $40 a year — over the years there’s been odd discounts ($30/year for a couple weeks) and a short lived Quarterly membership ($7 every 3 months). The original paywall cost me $1,500 to have developed and took close to three months to implement. Since then I have hired people to do minor updates to the system, but amazingly it has kept plugging away mostly as it was originally intended.
At the time I implemented this, there was simply no commercial option I could buy, or use, which had all the features I wanted (using Stripe as my payment processor was a major hurdle at the time as most plugins didn’t support Stripe). Had I waited just a couple months more, all the widely used plugins would add most of the support I wanted and needed, but I had made my bed and was already signing up members.