Is there an affordable way for non-students to subscribe to multi-journals/archives? As a student I had free access to thousands of scholarly articles through my universities in databases/archives such as JSTOR, EBSCOhost, Google Scholar, Econlit, PubMed, etc, etc.

With no subscription, glancing at the full text of any 1 article costs anywhere from $20 to $60. 

For any one project or paper I'd use at least five to ten papers and I'd skim over the full text of many more. For a meta-analysis of the literature, I'd go over dozens and perhaps even over a hundred papers.

As a non-student the cost is extremely prohibitive to continue reading past the free abstracts. I don't want to pirate the papers or give up reading them, but I can't find any reasonable alternatives.

Does anyone know of any monthly subscription I could sign up for to give me student-like/institutional access to papers? 


  Note:
  A community wiki answer has been added to this question to provide a list of solutions to the problem.
Many papers are freely available on authors' websites, and preprint servers (use search engine to find those). 
Write to the authors, asking for copies. Majority of academics are happy when their work is read, and will send you a copy.
Your public library might subscribe to more than you suspect. Check it out. When I was a student in a community college, my local public library subscribed to JSTOR for example.
Become a student or an academic again :-)