Hi @maryfavour, this was my response to @cardboard who said the same:

“You don’t have to pay, you can do the free option, paying just helps accelerate it. Bear in mind well known integrators like Coingate, who I’m also speaking to, won’t integrate for anything less than $20K, I tried to negotiate a free listing with Coingate but they are holding fast on an integration fee, their reasoning is it takes alot of dev time to do so and most of the time the listed tokens have low volume. I suspect the reason why Changelly delisted Steem.“