Infrastructure will always cost. Free is an illusion that the major platforms are masters at selling. That indeed is hard to compete with. It's harder to sell people on having to pay to use a service rather than be the product themselves. People don't realize how such models have shaped things like YouTube. Advertisers ultimately control what's on YouTube these days. Users paying would allow users to decide as a free market. Ads seem to always lead to a fiat type of environment where everything is murky. But I'm not sure how else to do "free." Context based ads would be a good start. That would probably be the closest we would get to pleasing everyone (users, creators, and advertisers).