Personally, I think it should simply be a month to try to system since, as you noted, not everyone dives in on day one

Indeed... the trend these days is toward 30day+ trials and hope to drip-feed some income. My non-sub models seems to have a tokenized pay-per-post system, but otherwise I'm a "full" member.

I've been trying to come up with a solution that jives better with the existing business model. This assumes there is a valid business model, and we're not being underwritten by Booksie. In this latter, let's call it a dire case, more drastic efforts may be required.

Instead of X days to play with the site, it could be done by counting the number of responses the person has received. If it's none, leave the account at premium until they get three responses (whether three responses to one posted work or to three works). If they never do, they'll disappear soon enough. Personally, I think it should simply be a month to try to system since, as you noted, not everyone dives in on day one. It's not like it's expensive for Sol to have a trial member in the system for longer than ten days.

I signed up for a Gemini Pro trial not long ago, and it runs for a year. Why force new/tentative members to rush this. People have lives.

This means you could start with 3 vowels and 4 consonants which would make the puzzle MUCH easier (But still sort of impossible)

When this was in my head, I pictured players would solve the blue squares first... this would turn the next crossing squares blue and be related words.

Example Car (blue) crosses "vehicle" yellow (Both contain a C + relation). Then vehicle turns blue.
Vehicle (blue) crosses "wheel" yellow
etc

The fact is the farther along the relation-chain you go, the more obscure the guesses become. I made one puzzle and put it away for a few days to "forget" the answers. When I came back I could hardly solve it myself.

I need to bring this back to the drawing board and consider actual clues/hints.

crossadoodle (hee, cross-a-doodle-doo!)

cross-o-saurus

cluezzle

picto- (word / scrawl / worm etc)

with special nod to an irregular "anticross" event where all the words have to be written backwards

Picaword? Pickaword? Or other variants.
Guessaword? Etc.

Assuming the answer requires the user to guess or pick a word, check a thesaurus for other variants of those two words. Take your favourites, and append -aword, -aname, or some other relevant suffix to the end of it.

Or: Ask Gemini. :-)

Pictocross - and I could not find it online.

I also found this:
CrossPics is a picture word puzzle game that offers over 10,000 free crossword puzzles with pictures for clues.

Crossoodle - this is weak, but it's not used and it might inspire someone else.
Crossdoodle - same as above.

I've designed a crossword with no clues - only a picture. It needs a name.

All the good, snappy names are taken such as "crosswordle" "pictoword" etc

My current contenders are

imagicross
descripticross
pictoworm*
cluezzle

*= Since it'll appear on the backup site, "worm" makes sense in this context

Dear creative brains! Throw me some other outlandish suggestions