Cutenews pricing

The original cutenews was a useful program, I used it a long time ago but then development appeared to have ceased and I became nervous that it would maybe become incompatible with, say, a new version of PHP. 
I would have been happy to pay but I had two issues: the price (currently GBP27.35, don't remember what it was before but not very different) compares very unfavourably with other paid-for utilities I use, especially since the only benefit is to remove the CuteNews credits (though I'm quite happy to reward developers for useful products, I do send voluntary contributions when developers are asking for them in respect of "free" open source/shareware software I'm finding useful).

Paying USD10 to remove a credit line - no problem. I also asked Cutenews (very many years ago) about quantity purchase.  The price quoted for 10 copies was ten times the single unit price, the price for 100 was 100 times unit price  That's just not business sense.  Since then the market has moved on, it's got easier to get inexpensive hosting with included MySQL and there are plenty of database driven alternatives to cutenews so the attraction of cutenews flat-file system is less than it was but I guess the server overhead on reading flat files is less than running up a full database for relatively small volumes of data.