Right, paying upwards $1000 for a hobby development tool is not common, even though there are more expensive hobbys.
LispWorks has the no-cost Personal Edition to get an impression and one can get trial licenses of the whole product.
Generally I fear that there is very little money to be made from a low-price (say: $100 - $300) Lisp implementation (the market is still small) and that few people will upgrade to a more expensive version of it (what would be the reason to do so?).
The question is, how many hobbyist licenses get sold at the current price? If that number is rather large - great good for them. If it is only a couple of licenses, then they might consider options which open up the environment to a larger audience. Like people completely new to Lisp. Which later might turn it towards commercial applications.
I tried the no-cost edition, but as it couldn't run my pet project I was working on back then (memory limit), that trial lasted a few minutes and I continued to use SBCL.
LispWorks has the no-cost Personal Edition to get an impression and one can get trial licenses of the whole product.
Generally I fear that there is very little money to be made from a low-price (say: $100 - $300) Lisp implementation (the market is still small) and that few people will upgrade to a more expensive version of it (what would be the reason to do so?).