I can't comment on the payment bit, aside from PayPal used to be very biased towards the customer and would make it very easy to reverse payments', which in turn would cause for a lot of non payers to have watched premium content. PayPal has improved that part of their business recently though, so who knows.
What do you get for paying? The best way to find out is to browse all the series here at Laracasts, note down the ones you are interested in and then see how many of them are paid. That will give you an insight in whether the paid plans are worth it. If its only the one or two series, maybe a month subscription is enough.
I actually got a creditcard just to get a premium membership, specifically for the forum-series. I'm with the Rabobank and it only cost me 50 cents more on the account I already had. So it doesn't cost much and for me it was worth it. And you can get a prepaid kind of creditcard too, which works like a voucher. I cant think of the name right now, but have a Google.
