I went free for awhile, but I found the evil of giving advfn money did not outweigh the unlimited posts.
For those who are free if you want to read posts en masse, there is a firefox extension called "autopager" I submitted the "rules" for Ihub so it works out of the box. I use it even as a paid member as it keep the "TOS violation" button for posts which is missing if you read 50 at a time as a paid member.