How can a prestigious, academic journal offer immediate, free access rights to all its post-prints while at the same time being able to generate sufficient revenues to be profitable on a lasting basis? The paper addresses this important question and proposes a citation based funding scheme for existing, non-commercial, prestigious journals. Such a funding scheme could - in combination with the currently applied peer review charging model - give this specific group of high quality journals not only an economic incentive to offer free access to their post-prints and to operate profitably on a lasting basis, but it would also lower the costs for the individual author/citer to reasonable levels and link the economic to the academic value of a post-print. The paper outlines the proposal, shows its advantages over the current peer-review charge model and discusses the main objections against such a citation based funding scheme. The paper concludes that there are various advantages of the citation based funding model and argues that - especially due to the lack of economic thinking in academia and to the lack of institutional pressure to omit citations - a "pay-to-cite" business model is not as abstruse as it looks at first sight.