heyas; yep, that's the way things used to be, internet service was charged by a minute rate. you'd get a certain number of hours for your base fee, then however many cents per minute. isp bills were expensive back then. and then we were saved by flat-fee services. one low monthly fee, and you could access all you want. get all the email you want, chat all you want, download tons of stuff all you want. life was good! now it looks like we're coming around full circle. what with all the 'free' sites charging for bandwidth and bandwidth this and bandwidth that, and you can't transfer this much and blah blah blah.... bandwidth: the final frontier. :/ since bandwidth is becoming such a big issue (and a big expense, not just for professional sites), i don't know as we can avoid the per-minute/per-hour/per-gig charges indefinitely. but as someone who remembers strictly budgeted online time, i'll fight it the best i can. it sucked.