I feel the same way! I got a gift membership after my first stories so I participated in some challenges and won one this January. Now I decided to pay for it for a couple of months again because of the challeges, but I'll probably cancel after a couple of months because another win is not realistic and it takes a lot of effort to participate.

It's just not worth it if it doesn't pay, and it currently doesn't. At first I got Top Stories a lot, so at least it paid for the membership, but if you don't get selected nobody will find your stories. The payout per view is not great, and you might get 3 views per story if you're lucky. It sucks, because I feel it's a much better platform for fiction than Medium. Then again, nobody reads my fiction there either :D so giving it one more month and canceling.

Definitely not getting the t-shirt lol, I couldn't believe what I was seeing.