If Gas Fees Were Optional…

What could “freemium” UX for gas look like across L2s?

Gas fees are one of those things crypto natives tolerate.
New users? Not so much.

“Why am I paying to click a button?”“Wait, I need ETH to use this app built on something else?”“What’s a gwei?”

To most people, gas feels like a glitch in the product, not a cost of the protocol. And the truth is: that friction kills more onboarding than we admit.

What If Gas Didn’t Have to Be Paid… Up Front?

Let’s imagine a Web3 UX where gas fees are invisible by default.
Not abstracted. Not discounted. Just… not there — unless you want them to be.

What would dApps look like if users could:

• Use features first, and settle gas later
• Skip fees altogether if it’s their first time
• Have a tab they clear monthly, like a credit card
• Watch an ad to “sponsor” a transaction
• Stake into a plan that covers their future activity

We’re not talking about a tech stack shift. We’re talking about a UX mindset shift. The Web2 Analogy: Freemium UX

In the Web2 world, payment friction is delayed, smoothed out, or entirely hidden at first.

• You can use Spotify for free until you’re annoyed enough to pay
• You can try Notion without entering a card
• You can binge YouTube and let the ad model handle the rest

Why doesn’t Web3 offer a similar ramp?

This Is Already Happening, But It’s Fragmented

• dYdX and Lens have covered gas via relayers
• Stackup and Biconomy offer paymasters and smart wallets
• Base and Optimism talk about user subsidies
• Zora abstracted minting fees into the protocol

But all of these still feel like developer-led experiments. The user rarely feels like they’re in control.

Let’s flip that.

Five Models for Optional Gas

Here’s how a future UX could look:

• Prepaid Gas Packs
  Buy a “gas pack” once, use across apps. Like prepaid data. Works best on L2s with shared infrastructure.
• Ad-Sponsored Actions
  Scroll a promoted NFT or watch a DAO promo — skip the gas. Basically Brave, but UX-native.
• DAO-Paid Interactions
  DAOs can choose to sponsor interactions for new members or key actions. Voting? Free. Proposal feedback? Free. Minting a badge? Free.
• Subscription UX
  Subscribe to your wallet — $5/month covers X actions across ZK-rollups. Stripe for gas.
• Deferred Gas UX
  You mint an NFT, use a DeFi pool, or send tokens — the dApp tracks usage, and charges once a week. Like Amazon’s “Buy Now, Pay Later” — but on-chain.

But… Wouldn’t This Break Everything?

Not really. The tooling exists: Account Abstraction, ERC-4337, meta-transactions, session keys.

The real blocker is UX imagination. Too many teams still design with the assumption that users must understand gas, plan around it, and prepay it.

But we don’t do that in any other digital system.

Optional Gas Isn’t Free — It’s Just Smarter

We’re not saying gas should vanish. We’re saying the way users experience gas needs to evolve.

Let them skip. Let them defer. Let them not think about it until they care.

If crypto wants to onboard millions, we need fewer dashboards asking for $0.98 to click a button, and more flows that just say:

“Go ahead. We got you.”

If Gas Fees Were Optional… was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.