Random anecdote: if you don't pay 99€ yearly for your developer subscription Apple revokes your certificates and disables your apps on the Apple app store. Your problem indeed.

You don't have to pay Apple to deploy to your own device. I don't have a developer subscription. You only have to pay the 99€ to access the store and provisioning.

Your certs only last 7 days and IIRC you can only deploy 3 apps if you don't pay the 99$/year though.

Installation from an app store has become a reasonable customer expectation for most kinds of smartphone/tablet software.