Youtube also didn't have a subscription option back in the day, and it also limited the length of videos you could upload. Things cost money to run, and something on the scale of Youtube costs a lot of money to run.

Now to be clear, I don't pay for Youtube or watch ads, but that's more because I object to directly giving Google my money with how much value they already generate just tracking and selling what browsing habits I am unable to obscure from them. If there was an option to pay Google $5-10 a month with the enforceable assurance that it came with absolutely no personal tracking and data collection, I would strongly consider it.

Most platforms usually start ad free and with no restrictions. That's how they capture a chunk of the market. Then, once they have an established customer base, they typically introduce ads or a subscription so they can actually pay for the hardware and bandwidth the service runs on.

This is what YouTube, Google, and pretty much everyone did. It's the standard play book.

One-time fees are not feasible for this type of business model. If the server costs are ongoing, meaning you have to pay for the user's usage constantly, then you need to either constantly charge them too, take money out of your own pocket to subsidize it, or sell customer data to once again subsidize it. Nothing is free.

A one-time fee would have to be absurdly high (think hundreds of dollars) to take into account multiple years of usage, otherwise it's too risky and you're most likely losing money.

This mindset that subscriptions are all evil when hardware and bandwidth are billed to you every month/year is ridiculous.

Kagi at least is honest from the get go and never tried to trick customers into believing their service would be free forever. That's what's actually shitty behavior, when companies put out a product that they then enhsittify for the purposes of extracting profit.

Kagi was a subscription from the get go and told you that's how they pay their bills, and in return you get the service they promised with no compromises. I'm not arguing whether the price is fair, but at least the business model is honest and doesn't try to take advantage of me and my data.

You would understand a one-time fee for an active, ongoing, online service?? I'm a fucking communist, please don't make me defend capitalism...

Even back in the day, people would buy versions of software on disks and updates were limited. There's a reason why the idea of perpetual licenses died hard and fast and every company everywhere either reneged or died.

I pay for Kagi. If they offered a "one-time lifetime purchase" I'd probably just stop because that would be a giant red flashing neon warning sign.

Why don’t you make an alternative without ads or subscriptions? I’d love to use a video platform as big as youtube without having to pay with money or my attention.

Quick question, how were you planning to cover costs?

I don’t understand this line of thinking. A one time fee for an internet service you could potentially use for a decade? I host a number of small projects online and if I scale them way down in terms of hardware resources and don’t add a database or external services (required for basically any functionality), I’m still paying a few bucks a month. Add a database to it and it doubles. Now add a fucking crawler and your egress data rates are gonna climb quick. Not to mention the domain name itself is $12-15 a year.

A one time fee is not compatible with an online service. Ads historically have filled this gap for recurring revenue. If you don’t want ads, there’s literally no other ethical choice to make sure you can stay in business and ideally turn a small profit.

You keep mentioning YouTube was ad free, and sure. But that’s the classic Silicon Valley model. Offer a great product cheaper (ad free) than others, gain adoption, and once you have a huge user base, start to ratchet up the price. Either via ads or subscriptions. You need deep pockets and lots of VC money to make this work and ultimately you’re pulling a bit of a bait and switch on your users. Is that the model you want to support?