Only abused IP ranges have to pay a fee. The fee is an anti-abuse measure, and it is not meant to be (and isn't) much of a source of revenue.

If any very-veteran members want to volunteer, I can give you the ability to whitelist newbies. (All Staff can already do this, as well.) Perhaps then someone could create a topic like "List of email addresses for people who can whitelist you for free", which I could link-to on the evil fee page. However, these IPs have evil for a reason. If it was sufficient for them to just solve a captcha or something, I'd have them do that. Before whitelisting someone, you have to do something to be pretty sure that they're not evading a ban and just going to get banned again. You may get the impression from complaints on the forum that everyone hits the fee and it's never warranted, but this is selection bias: the fee is more rare, and the vast majority of accounts that hit it usually should not be whitelisted.