Fair pushback. Costs are choices, and we are not rejecting cost reduction.

Thanks for actual suggestions! But the "just move to R2/object storage/CDN" assumption is not automatically cheaper for our actual usage pattern. We did a rough comparison for image infrastructure, and a full migration to that kind of setup looked roughly 2.5x more expensive for us, not cheaper.

R2 has attractive parts, especially egress, but the full cost depends on storage volume, request volume, cache behavior, transformations, migration work, and operational requirements. Managed services can reduce some maintenance, but they do not always reduce total cost.

There are also only a few public imagehoster instances we are aware of, mainly images.hive.blog and images.ecency.com. Ecency apps can already use images.hive.blog, so yes, switching away from our own imagehoster would be one way to reduce cost. But that does not make the cost disappear. It mostly shifts more load and responsibility onto another operator.

The same applies to public RPC infrastructure. api.hive.blog and images.hive.blog are valuable services, but they are not free to run just because users do not see a bill. Someone still pays for servers, bandwidth, maintenance, and operations. Running independent Ecency infrastructure gives Hive a second path, adds redundancy, and reduces the burden on a single generous supporter or operator of the chain.

Where we agree is that architecture should be reviewed and simplified where possible. That is part of why we reduced the ask and said we will scale down commitments.

Where we disagree is that Hive alone covers the frontend layer. Hive stores the chain, but users still need reliable access, images, search/indexing, APIs, onboarding, abuse handling, support, monitoring, and maintained apps.

The code is open source, and if the community believes this can be operated much cheaper with a concrete architecture, we welcome proposals, PRs, or community-run instances. But whoever runs it has to take responsibility for the full operational surface, not only the parts that look simple from outside.