The economy on MAM is mostly points based and you'll generally get very little organic upload. You only need to download some freeleach stuff (or use freeleach tokens) until you're getting enough bonus points hourly to meet your needs. Upload credit is actually very cheap to buy with points and VIP status isn't that expensive either. Plus the community generally donates a ton of points to all new users - even more so if you're at all active on the shoutbox.

If you don't want to donate 5$ to the website you need to wait 4 weeks before you're eligible for VIP, and a lot of content is locked behind VIP. Fortunately though after the 4 week waiting period its very easy to keep VIP all the time. Even easier if you don't want to keep VIP all the time and only need it once or occasionally to download specific content. All VIP content is freeleach to VIPs and locked to VIPs only. This incentivises people to be longstanding active members of the community and not hit and run after grabbing one or two books they were looking for.