Status upkeep is easy, especially if you have a writ vendor as one of your early amenities. 10% of any status you earn, either from tradeskill writs, adventure writs or SP items is duplicated to the guild. You need to be guild level 30 to purchase the lowest tier guild hall. Your fastest option is probably chain-running kill-writs with your group, but completing Heritage Quests as a group can award a lot of Status too. If you're loaded, there's also the option of buying status items off the broker, but really, with a group kill writs are still probably going to be fastest.

Once you hit 30, you can get a tier 1 guild hall and 5 amenities. The first thing I did was to get the Tradeskill Rush Order vendor, Guild Fuel Merchant {amenities} and a Work Order Clipboard all the personal crafting stations so I could sit in my guild hall running back to back tradeskill writs, because I love crafting in EQ2. This gives me a fair amount of money and a ton of status, which you can donate directly to your guild hall's escrow account and use to pay for guild upkeep and amenities.

It should be noted that you don't lose anything if you stop paying. Well, obviously, you lose access to everything in the guild hall, but all you have to do is pay the upkeep, which is not additive, so you only need to pay for a week of use up front, not any of the previous time you missed.

The upkeep itself is pretty minimal anyway, it's the upfront costs that hurt. I've gotten my guild up to 39 so I've got a tier 1 guild hall with 7/7 amenities -

Amenity Purchase Cost Upkeep Cost
Fuel Merchant 10p 1,000,000sp 20g 5,000sp/wk
Gatherer Hireling 20p 2,000,000sp 40g 10,000sp/wk
Guild Hall Banker 10p 1,000,000sp 20g 5,000sp/wk
Guild Translocation Beacon 1p 250,000sp 2g 1,250sp/wk
Harvesting Supply Depot 25p 5,000,000sp 50g 25,000sp/wk
Miner Hireling 20p 2,000,000sp 40g 10,000sp/wk
Tradeskill Rush Order Agent 10p 1,000,000sp 20g 5,000sp/wk



Note that there's nothing that reduces the cash or status cost of guild halls like there is for personal housing. My upfront cost has totaled 146p {all the above amenities, even though you can only get 5 to start, + initial guild hall price} and 12,250,000sp. It also cost me an additional ~6p and 3,450,000sp for 7 elaborate workstations to do my tradeskill writs on, but that's a cost you can skip if you choose an Adventure Writ NPC instead of the tradeskill one.

Anyway, with all that upfront cost, my weekly upkeep cost is only 2p, 42g and 111,250sp. My level 92 Sage gets 19,591sp per Rush Order Writ, which takes me about 4-5 minutes to complete. So doing rush writs for about half an hour gives me enough status for a week's upkeep. My level 40 Carpenter gets 5600sp per, so it would take about 20 writs or about an hour and a half. Of course that will be significantly less time with several toons at once on kill writs.