> Considering there is no revenue at all right now, and he’s likely spending thousands on hosting, he was probably dying to offload it.

Thousands?

It's a 60kb Javascript file, seems quite static to all users, and appears to be cached and delivered from CloudFlare. I don't think their free accounts have bandwidth limits, just feature limits, so... it's probably more "pennies" on hosting than "thousands." Given the popularity of it, it's a good bet that it's almost always in the CF cache, so very few requests going through to the origin.

This is more of a "You could host it on a home ISP" type project with how well caching systems handle it. Or toss it in a Google Cloud Storage bucket, which has reduced egress fees to CF and it'll still be constantly cached.

Nothing I see indicates it's the slightest bit expensive to host.

From an interview with the developer:

> put Cloudflare in front of my website; then more recently, we migrated the hosting to Amazon S3, which can scale indefinitely as long as I’m happy to pay for it.

...

> it does cost me a bit to keep the servers up to run Wordle

https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/12/josh-wardle-interview-word...

It shouldn’t… It would be free on github pages, netlify, and others. Cloudflare should make anywhere else effectively free, as well. It’s likely a decision to reuse whatever existing hosting/deploy strategy he uses for the rest of his site or just apathy towards spending however much is being spent.

Cloudflare Pages (their Netlifly / Vercel competitor) offers unlimited free bandwidth. Wonder why he switched to AWS?

To a large degree: https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github...

Indeed, the app is completely client-side with static files, and it seems there is already a fully functional mirror of the current version on IPFS:

https://bafybeic4blel5vf4il73n3nzt6vw7npsov6or3cp3myjms4npii...

Yeah, it should be almost free to host given that it's completely static.

From what I can tell it's all client side, including all 5 letter words. You could host it pretty cheaply.

Yep, I just downloaded the files and I'm running it locally. It only took a few minutes.

I think part of the success of wordle was the network effect of having a single word to share your success or failure with everyone who's playing. For a group of friends you could probably get people to switch but there's still the wider population effect of the shared puzzle each day. That second is much harder for any copycats to replicate.

He's probably paying tens of dollars per month if he put Cloudflare in front of it.