About a month in I hit the pay-to-play wall. It creeps up on you til one day you realize you're hardly ever actually playing dress-up anymore, just spending all your time on recipe crafting so you can advance. Which requires tons of stamina... so you have to pay to advance, or wait forever. It's such a fun game at first that I even considered paying, but you have to pay a LOT to get any real benefit. The cheap benefits aren't worth it and are just there to ease you into paying.