Hosted mediawiki is plenty cheap. When wikicities became Wikia they added some ads. They eventually redesigned it to look like a monstrosity because the $. I moved my very large wiki, which eventually became dnd-wiki.org, off of it at this point and self hosted it for a $10/mo virtual machine. Then Wikia became fandom and somehow became even worse.

It is cheap. Plenty of us left at the time Wikia became garbage and went independent. It just requires technical know how that most people don't have.

For a lot of people 10 dollars a month isn't cheap.

For me - no problem. I have a few side projects and I shell out around 15 - 25 Euros each month.

But I know a lot of people who would love to do stuff like that and have no way of at least being easily reimbursed by the community for their efforts.

A community of 50 people could be financing this with 20 cents each per month.

But as privacy intrusive advertising became the norm no solution ever grew enough to become feasible for the masses.

I remember the flattr button. I used flattr for a while. But in the end I stopped.

tl;dr 10 bucks are not cheap to anybody. I wish easy micropayments were a thing.

> For a lot of people 10 dollars a month isn't cheap.

I'm aware of this, but you need to keep in mind that we were one of the largest wikis on Wikia (in the top 30 iirc). That's the only reason it cost $10/month.

Most of the wikis on Wikia were tiny, got small traffic, and could have probably been hosted with mine on my VM without even affecting mine.

The last metric that I calculated to host a small wiki on Gamepedia was about $3 USD per month. It is probably a bit higher than that now. That included costs for hosting through AWS next to large wikis like Minecraft Wiki that would easily be a large majority of the monthly costs.(Game updates would vastly skew the monthly costs for each of the large wikis.)

It was always fun seeing the traffic spikes during large game updates though

Memory Alpha (primary Star Trek wiki) is another one that was self-hosted and as a user of it I mostly just accepted that sometimes it would be down due to Mediawiki upgrades or traffic reasons or otherwise. They also migrated to Wikia when shared hosting seemed like a better deal than hosting Mediawiki themselves, and now in the "Fandom" age it's just irritating that it is no longer just disconnected shared hosting (which Wikia had briefly promised to Memory Alpha that it would stay independent) and is now such a blatant advertising infested cash grab. I don't directly know who runs that wiki, but I do sometimes wonder (as a user) if they regret the consolidation (and if they have any escape plans).