I have heard mixed things. As a free user I get half the speed or less of rapidshare as a paid member. Not that this proves anything. My Rapidshare subscription just expired and while I like the speed and the download manager the sudden and massive reduction in Rapidshare link availability is a bit of a pain. Where, I used to get links from a link site I now often have to go to the link site to get the file name and then used google or filestube to find a rapidshare link.
Do people really care that badly about getting a few extra credits for uploading? Apparently they do.