It's 20 cents for the 4 months. You get a bill monthly for the amount of listings you posted and the amount of sales you had, but you only pay that 20 cents once.
I've had success there. In the 4 months I've been there, I've made 39 sales. So almost 10 a month. Not a huge amount, but I'm hoping for it to pick up. But in regards to etsy standards that is really good. Some people do better than others. If you don't put time into listing new things in your store and you're in a saturated category like jewelry, painting, cards etc then you probably won't sell much because as it is, the search results come based on the date listed, not relevancy. There's talk that they are going to change the search results to help, but it hasn't happened yet.
So, for instance, in my chinchilla product store, I don't really have to update it very often because there aren't too many chinchilla/bird etc sellers. But my dog store, there are quite a few other sellers that make collars so I have to list a collar every couple days to stay up in the search results. It isn't bad for me, because I'd be making them anyways, but if you don't have the time, it might be hard.
Shophandmade.com and artfire.com both have free accounts, but aren't as well known so they might also not get as many sales. I didn't have any success at shophandmade, and just signed up for artfire so I don't have any input on artfire.
