It's ONE DOLLAR per month. ONE DOLLAR! And it's only if you want the extra features. Would you rather have ads be inserted between your songs or something? The development of the app needs to be paid for one way or the other.

You don't need to. Since subsonic is Open Source, there's naturally multiple forks with the licensing code removed. The best fork, which also adds features, is madsonic[0]. I recommend it. In addition, if you already have subsonic, the license code is simply a check if your password = the md5 of your email. So using "example@example.com" and "23463b99b62a72f26ed677cc556c44e8" will make it think you're a valid subscriber and give you all features.

[0]: http://www.madsonic.org/

You don't need to. It's a freemium model - paying a subscription gets you some extra features, like apps for mobile.

We all need to eat.