Alistair Benn forum - I'm furious!

Hi everyone, just though I'd stick this here to get it off my chest. I discovered Alistair Benn through this forum, and love his philosophy of expressing yourself and your emotions through photography.

Watching one of his YT tutorials 'Landscape Photography: Why is getting good exposure so important?', he mentions his Expressive Photography forum, and I thought that would be a great place to join.

I'm horrified and pissed that he charges $18/month to be a member of the forum, or over $180/year!

Okay, he might be one of the top 100 landscape photographers out there (as he claims), but the Luminous Landscape forum is free, and they charge $12/year to get their articles.

To me that is just greedy and elitist. The Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom package is $10/month, and a load of us have moved away from Adobe because who wants to be paying that forever (I have Photoshop CS5 as my main workhorse, don't use my Lightroom 5 any more, and also have Affinity Photo 2).

I guess the upside is he will only have high level enthusiasts/professionals on there, but also only relatively wealthy ones. There will be a lot of excellent enthusiasts/professionals who wouldn't be able to or prepared to pay that monthly or yearly rate.

Am I wrong in thinking this? Interested to hear your responses