Damn, 1 cent fee is 1% it's far too much already!
I usually pay a 0.1% fee and it goes in the first blocks!
Fees go per kilobytes used in the blockchain, not per amount sent. The blockchain doesn't care if you send 0.01 btc or 10 btc - only about how much space is used by the transaction.
Well. Logical I suppose. But how do you know the size of your transaction?
side note, my TX is the min size ~256bytes
block height 399870
0 confirmations
I have begun this experiment too, with transferring approximately $1 (although I think that the same fee will pretty much apply for a $100 or $1,000.
I sent it 3 times, and I adjusted the fee to be either .0001 BTC per kilobyte ($.04 fee), .000025 per kilobyte ($.01 fee) and .00001 per kilobyte ($.004 fee).
The higher two showed up on the receiving end without confirmations within a couple of minutes of my sending them; however the lowest one, which is essentially nearly no fees, has not yet even shown up on the other end, so far, after 22 minutes.
I will attempt to check the extent of the update, every 30 minutes in order to verify whether they have confirmations.