running a relay shouldn't cost $500k/mo tho
Discussion
you have fees, taxes, customer support, the volume of data at that many users is huge, software devs etc.
and then there needs to be money left to reinvest into the product
my point is that business always has two sides. if your service is economically efficient, seemingly trivial payments might add up. but i agree that there's a minimum necessary volume
currently 10k users throwing $0.5/mo would hardly fund 1 full time dev and servers including taxes and lost opportunities in other work areas
do you need $5k/mo in hardware? yes, paying a dev salary has been exceedingly difficult for over a decade, but i wouldn't expect a relay to need full time support? dunno. i have 128 epyc cores, 1TB of RAM, and 20 TB of disk space for less than $5k up front 🤷
You don’t need $5k/mo just for HW. You need it for HW + dev combined.
You’d need some level of redundancy and customer support as well, and to be able to dedicate enough time to it which could mean dropping a job.