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A comment on "About half of Bandcamp was laid off today". Parent comment

Re:"About half of Bandcamp was laid off today" by amrocha on Monday October 16, 2023 @03:45PM (#37905330)
Yes, you can get that for cheaper, but then you're not the customer you're the product.

If you tried rolling your own solution you'd be paying more than 20$ per month.

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Re:"About half of Bandcamp was laid off today" by dharmab on Monday October 16, 2023 @05:23PM (#37906856)
I pay $0 a month to host a website. A number of artists I've bought from have you pay with paypal and a download link is included on your receipt. That's what, nine cents per transaction plus five percent, and minimal egress charges from a cloud provider.
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Re:"About half of Bandcamp was laid off today" by amrocha on Monday October 16, 2023 @09:26PM (#37909157)
Hosting costs money and you're getting that for free, so there's something else going on there.

You're paying for PayPal on their margin.

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Re:"About half of Bandcamp was laid off today" by dharmab on Monday October 16, 2023 @10:37PM (#37909834)
> so there's something else going on there

Cloudflare free tier as a CDN. They're on the record about why they do it- mainly, it generates large sales leads, makes it easier to hire, and provides them a community of willing QA testers for new features.

Hosting costs for a small website are literally pennies a month if your content can be cached. Plenty of truly free origin hosts available. GitHub Pages is a popular ine.

> You're paying for PayPal on their margin

So? Bandcamp charges 15% for small artists.

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Re:"About half of Bandcamp was laid off today" by amrocha on Monday October 16, 2023 @11:02PM (#37910048)
Right, so Cloudflare makes their money one way or another. If at some point they decide it's not worth it to host free content anymore then you're out of luck.

That's what I mean, there is a cost of doing business and someone has to pay it. It sounds like Bandcamp was a shitty partner too, but the larger point still stands I think.

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