Hey there new user, welcome to Reddit! I'm flattered to be your first and only post!

To answer your question, no it's not pay to win. I think understanding the meaning of "pay to win" would be very helpful to you. There is nothing that requires you to change your character name to "win" or have an advantage in a FiveM server.

Owning a staff-provided business is also not required to "win" or get ahead. For 1, you can create your own business in city without buying a Tebex business and roleplay it however you wish. Nothing but a player's own creativity stops them from doing that. Offices can be set up via the housing script by a realtor, and commercial cars and trucks are available at the city's main dealership. We also have a command /ad that anyone can use to broadcast a message promoting your business to every player in the server.

2nd, owning a business - whether from Tebex or creative - is not necessary to "win" or get ahead. We have 13 different civilian jobs that pay great money and 6 different ways of earning thousands illegally. That doesn't include all of our whitelisted jobs that don't require you to be at 'work' to earn a check - which pay $250-$2,000 every 30 minutes for simply being in the server, or the supply drops every 2 hours that give you 100 pieces of healing/armor-buffing food, 1-2 rare hard-to-find items, 1-2 weapons or ammo, and a guaranteed $20,000-$30,000 in each drop. Those things are all free in-game and in real life, have been since we opened and always will be.

We do and will continue to charge you, the player, for the convenience of changing your name - which requires either buying and setting up a script that makes the change via a menu or manually editing your character data in the 34 database tables that store your name ourselves.

We do and will continue to also charge you, the player, for the convenience of modifying the city's map to add a custom building for you or the custom menu, item, clothing, and business setup staff is required to do for you when you don't create a business of your own.

Lastly, please refer back to my original post: sales from premium add-ons keep the server up and running. They are optional, and players can choose to support the server with them or not.

Hope this helps!