Shireroth

For 1 gold, you can guess what resources you have, and we'll tell you if you're right. If you are, you can start producing them, and we'll tell you when you're producing too many. We won't tell you exactly how many.
For 3 gold, you can guess what resources you have, and if you guess them all correctly, we'll tell you how many you have of them.
For 4 gold, we'll just tell you how many resources you have.

Since I *know* I won't ever *guess*. Resources ARE based off the MCS Resource Map, but may not be entirely obvious as I tried to even them out.

And I'll pay the 8 gold to know the resources of my two plots.

From the Resource Charter

For a fee of 5 gold units, a team will survey the plot and determine what types of resources can be extracted, how many, and whether they are mutually exclusive.

So are these fees here special starting rates or what?

Whatever the fee is, I´ll pay to know the full deal - either 12 gold or 15 gold.

No, these are longterm fees. If you pay 20 for the plot, you wouldn't want to pay much more to know what's in it.