They raised the price during the weekend. Not sure what happened. I was looking at the 9.99 price on Friday, but didn't have time to buy it then. Looked again on Saturday and it went up to something like 29.99 I think. I bought it anyway because I wanted to start playing Rift with my kids and we did have fun. I was just disappointed in what seemed like an unethical change of pricing during a sale.
I was also disappointed to find you can't have two game accounts on one id like in WoW. I guess this is their stupid social media hype in action.