On fippy we farmed platinum, bought those 30 day station cards which could turn into station cash, which you could use station cash to buy one month. Smart people would save them for the double and triple station cash days, redeem them that day get 2-3x the value aka 2-3 months free. The cost was about 10k platinum, so yeah it was more costly to fund an account.
6 box team 60k platinum a month but I only started fippy in PoP. I ended up with a 6 box team by OOW, but then again you also had RAF accounts so you could teleport your chars to the account that referred it and level hella faster.
It was also a lot harder to find buyers, you had to convince people to run to walmart to buy the cards rofl. It would take a bit to find and sometimes walmart would be out of cards etc. It was definitely more fun though seeing who would go, whenever someone in guild went to buy bulk ones it was liek christmas cause everyone in the guild had been saving up cause they knew 2-3x day was coming (usually a holiday) or couldnt find a seller.
Toxn had his own box team then too though, about 3 groups and I think they all had a 1 year sub. It wasn't hard with the 3x station days.. spend 40k buy 4 cards, wait for triple day and bam year sub dont worry about it. 40k in terms of 12 months is nothin. Toxn sold powater/fire drops for days though, he banked.