I don’t understand this line of thinking. A one time fee for an internet service you could potentially use for a decade? I host a number of small projects online and if I scale them way down in terms of hardware resources and don’t add a database or external services (required for basically any functionality), I’m still paying a few bucks a month. Add a database to it and it doubles. Now add a fucking crawler and your egress data rates are gonna climb quick. Not to mention the domain name itself is $12-15 a year.
A one time fee is not compatible with an online service. Ads historically have filled this gap for recurring revenue. If you don’t want ads, there’s literally no other ethical choice to make sure you can stay in business and ideally turn a small profit.
You keep mentioning YouTube was ad free, and sure. But that’s the classic Silicon Valley model. Offer a great product cheaper (ad free) than others, gain adoption, and once you have a huge user base, start to ratchet up the price. Either via ads or subscriptions. You need deep pockets and lots of VC money to make this work and ultimately you’re pulling a bit of a bait and switch on your users. Is that the model you want to support?
I don’t understand this line of thinking. A one time fee for an internet service you could potentially use for a decade? I host a number of small projects online and if I scale them way down in terms of hardware resources and don’t add a database or external services (required for basically any functionality), I’m still paying a few bucks a month. Add a database to it and it doubles. Now add a fucking crawler and your egress data rates are gonna climb quick. Not to mention the domain name itself is $12-15 a year.
A one time fee is not compatible with an online service. Ads historically have filled this gap for recurring revenue. If you don’t want ads, there’s literally no other ethical choice to make sure you can stay in business and ideally turn a small profit.
You keep mentioning YouTube was ad free, and sure. But that’s the classic Silicon Valley model. Offer a great product cheaper (ad free) than others, gain adoption, and once you have a huge user base, start to ratchet up the price. Either via ads or subscriptions. You need deep pockets and lots of VC money to make this work and ultimately you’re pulling a bit of a bait and switch on your users. Is that the model you want to support?