Right, but a Relay is literally a network-wide optimization. That's why in my other comment I'm mentioning that it's hard to do apples-to-apples comparison. With Mastodon, you only have one possible role: "hosting an instance" (which is like hosting a mini-Twitter with almost no data). ATProto aims higher in terms of UX (shared world by default) so there are different distributable pieces with different incentives to run. Anyone can self-host a PDS for super cheap (which will store only your data). But running a Relay is useful as an optimization for whoever's running the actual backends. So if you're a company building on ATProto, maybe you run your own Relay just in case (or maybe you don't and reuse an existing one). Or if you're a collective of people, maybe you pool resources together to run your own independent Relay. It's not something you'd just run for yourself unless you're a huge enthusiast.

Gotcha, thanks for that context!

An important note here is the $30/mo is for the relay which is _not_ something the average user will ever need to run

Instead, you're looking for hosting a PDS which you absolutely can do for $10/mo (or less)

I run a PDS on a OVH Cloud VPS for $5/mo for myself, some alts, and some bots

Aaah, ok, thanks for the clarification!