Okay now these are opinions are coming from a total and complete newbie point of view so bear with me guys
I personally as a webmaster out there building free sites and submitting faithfully would never use an autosubmitter for a couple of reasons. When I first started I got 1 piece of advice that has stuck with me and proven incredibly true.
It was...if I was going to be in this biz for the long haul then respect, credibility and reputation were paramount. I have worked my ass off to learn and get my feet under me, and while I am more than willing to save myself time when I can, I also will not do anything that would put me in a light as being anything but someone who is willing to put back in as much as I am getting out, and having people who have been a long time in this biz who I have nothing but respect for look at me as anything but that. And that philosophy has worked well and paid off more than any time I could possibly save myself by not taking that extra time to hand submit. If they are going to show me and my work the respect to go through everything needed to review my site the very least I can do is respect their work enough to actually go to their site and fill out their form. And truthfully, after I have spent all the time building it, it seems backwards to me to not want to make sure right there and then that my submit went through with no problems, there were no rule changes I needed to be aware of, etc. Also, I have yet to run into a submit form that takes longer than about 30 seconds to fill out, or a list of rules that takes longer than a minute to read. Which seems to me to be very minimal for the returns.
As for paid hosting vs revshare or free I do have to say that having started out with paid hosting was probably one of the best things I could have done. BECAUSE....it made me work harder and want to learn more. After I had built a few sites and my bandwidth expense started to go up, it really made me start looking at what I was doing, and adjusting and trying to refine right away. I can honestly say I don't know if I would have worked as hard with each consecutive site to make it better or jumped in with so many questions to so many people to learn more about what I was doing right and what just really wasn't a good idea, if I wouldn't have felt it in my wallet right away. There were alot of things I can see the importance of figuring out sooner than later now, but if every month I didn't actually have that extra little push in the beginning I can say I probably would have taken it all alot slower and not pushed myself forward as hard as I did. And wouldn't necessarily have made those little tweaks to each site before submitting them if I weren't going to paying for each and every one of them. It made sense to me that every site should be the absolute best I could make it because I was actually going to pay for it whether I made money from it or not, so I better start figuring out how to get it to pay off sooner than later. And it got me into the good habit of taking each day and learning more, and pulling from the resources I plugged into then.
Anyway...just a little newbie's 2 whole spare cents on it all LOL
Jaden