We work in two industries, so yeah, we're working essentially two full time jobs. 40-60 hours in job one, 20-40 hours running Golden Plume Comics. We won't say what job #1 is, but it's a necessity. Guess what... customers say, "this is too expensive" or "your not cheap enough" all the time.
Here's a prime example, look at how many posts there are with people asking for artists to work on their series for $0.
One time we did an emergency job for someone with little notice. After we were done and it came to the bill the customer pulled out $1 and said, "Let's start at a buck." Seriously. They wanted to negotiate payment for an emergency response after the emergency was solved and their starting point was one dollar.
Customers routinely don't pay their bills. We do a lot of half to start half at finish. You get the first half but as for the second half... you send letter after letter asking for payment and no response. Every year about 5-10% of our total income goes unpaid and there's nothing you can do about it unless you want to go to small claims court or send it to a collection agency. Unfortunately now with Google allowing people to slam you with terrible false reviews that you more or less cannot fight, you just eat it rather than starting an online battle over an unpaid bill.
Did you know that store theft adds over $400 to the average American family's shopping bill yearly? Stores purposely raise prices to cover theft losses. What would you do with an extra $400 in your pocket?
http://money.cnn.com/2010/10/18/news/economy/store_theft_drain_on_your_wallet/index.htm
Basically you will see people complaining about price no matter what industry you work in. Some just complain, others find ways to get things for what they feel is a "fair" price.
You think that maybe these people are really in need of "stealing a loaf of bread because they are hungry" but in most cases, a lot of the unpaid bills are people who just have their values system mixed up. One time we were in the middle of a job when a Girl Scout walked up and asked, "Would you want to buy some cookies?" The customer said, "Oh, sure, six boxes." After we were done we gave the person the bill and they said they didn't have enough money and if we could put it in the mail. Another time a customer demanded that we needed to charge them far less for our service, that way they could give out nice Christmas gifts... and this was after doing something that was 100% optional.
Tapas routinely gives out 200-300 free bonus coins several times a month. They actually gave out coins much more frequently last year but people complained that it was "spammy" so they reduced the bonus coin frequency.
You can get unlimited 200 bonus coins awards for each friend who downloads the app using your friend code. Most people have 100s of friends on Facebook.
Google Opinion Rewards pays out Google Credits which can be used to buy Tapas coins. Most of the surveys are 3 questions long and take less than a minute to do.
Surveys On The Go or Swagbucks take longer but pay out much better. We got $30 once for going into Costco, taking a picture of a refrigerator, answering some questions, all of which took about 10 minutes, not counting the drive time. Another time we got $15 for watching one episode of Family Feud and one episode of Big Bang Theory and answering questions for 10 minutes.
What we're getting at is there are a lot of opportunities for readers to get coins to read premium stuff. They just don't want to bother. They're used to everything else being free on YouTube or Wattpad so why not on Tapas too.
There's nothing you can do about it. You are a hard working creator producing something of value which some will recognize and which some will not. Unfortunately our society is slowly drifting towards a system where everything is a right and nothing is earned, which ultimately strips the value away from everything, including comics.