Most of these costs are a choice, not a law of nature, and that's what the whole post talks around.

Images on object storage plus a CDN cost a fraction of self-hosted hosting, R2 and friends have zero egress, managed Postgres and search are cheap and simple. You don't need an in-house fleet of nodes, search, indexing and signing services at full redundancy to run a frontend. You've chosen the expensive architecture and you're asking the DHF to fund the difference. The post even admits cheaper setups exist, then reframes picking the costly one as resilience. That's not resilience, that's a spending decision dressed up as a principle.

Hive IS the resilience. The whole point of Hive is that it is decentralised and absorbs a lot of the costs a normal front-end would have to incur. You admit that you have knowingly made things more expensive and complex, but the reasoning doesn't add up for me. I've been around long enough to remember before the rise of cloud computing providers like AWS. It's so cheap to host and run stuff now, and it's safe and easy to configure to abide to by a heap of regulations and standards out of the box.

The Lithuanian fine is unfortunate but it's a one-off, and one-off legal costs don't justify a recurring daily ask. UGC exposure also comes down to how and where you incorporate and operate. The DHF didn't choose to put Ecency under EU jurisdiction. That's on Ecency, and the answer is to structure smarter to limit it, not to bill Hive for it. Europe is a notoriously legislative heavy continent. When you choose to do business in Europe you know you're going to pay more than incorporation somewhere else.

Nobody's saying Ecency does nothing. It does real work and obviously it costs money. But the real conversation is leaner infrastructure at a smaller number, not 250 a day to keep running everything the most expensive way available.

You guys/gals need to get someone who knows what they're doing to get things setup properly for you. Otherwise what's to say you're not going to get another unexpected fine or problem? Ecency is great, but you can't operate with an open source/zero sum mindset or what happens when a cost comes up you can't pay next time?