There's no way for a video platform to work without some sort of payment. Video costs money. Thankfully, Cloudflare R2 is enough for the average blogger. You just gotta figure out how to use it.

I'm building a short-form video platform with R2 as the storage backend. I figured out transcoding but I definitely need a better server for it. The old web isn't coming back because "free" is rife for abuse.

I've embedded a video on my homepage from my platform (dogfooding). Not sure I'll share the platform here when I soft launch next week or so, HN doesn't like incomplete products.

All this to say, video with decent quality is possible for the average website.