It’s a little tough these days. With AI and scraping, running an open webapp/website is now more expensive than ever before. My friends and I have launched a product in the last few months and decided to focus on mobile first and wait to develop a webapp simply because we couldn’t feel we could optimize the costs of open webapp while we have so few resources.
How expensive can it be?
I just randomly looked at Railway and for $20 a month you get a whole lot. I've hosted many a web project (successful personal projects and enterprise projects alike) and I don't see a large barrier to entry on "hosting a website" here.
Blocking AI scrapers and crawlers is not a huge ordeal. Planning for a unicorn before just putting a product up isn't the way to go.
https://railway.com/pricing
> Blocking AI scrapers and crawlers is not a huge ordeal.
If you have content they want, then it is a huge ordeal. You can pay some one like CloudFlare to take care of it for you, but if you can't or won't make a deal with those types of companies, it's going to take up a significant chunk of your time.
Before AI I regularly consumed a larger international news aggregator ran by a single person.
Then with ChatGPT he had to enshittify his website with all these cloudflare capture stuff, making the site leeesssssssss fun to use; when complaining he mailed me that AI scrapers are slashing his servers