With three days left, it seems that we are less than a third of the way to funding the forum for the next month. I've already coughed up another $10 to add to the $15 I donated earlier this month. But we have a hell of a lot of people using the forum (40+ posters in the last day alone). C'mon, folks! Shoot these good people a little geetus ... at least what Starbucks charges for a cup of coffee. I sure don't want to see this forum die on the vine. We're better than that.
Well, no. You can use without paying, just like you can use Wikipedia without paying. It's totally up to you to decide whether the service you're getting is worth paying for. But somebody has to pay, eventually. If they don't, the service goes away. If you're good with that, then by all means refrain from paying.
I think you can do it through stripe as well as paypal.. I think BACS is only possible if Daniel sets it up, which is problematic as he isn't around currently @minstrel can you add further wisdom ?
To pay the server and other hosting fees ... hosting a forum of this size on a reliable server is not cheap.
Here's a thread where @Daniel broke down the costs: https://www.writingforums.org/threads/183-dollar-server-cost.157732/