Don't think you're Google and you have money to throw away... they only do that because they do have money to throw away, but they know that this kind of expense may, in very rare cases, pay off later as they find a market worth exploring further... you don't have that luxury. Indie developers offering free services which actually cost them money only makes sense if they have proven plans to "convert" most free users to a paid plan, otherwise you're literally donating services to your "users".
Is the cost mostly bandwidth? Cloudflare free tier is a godsend for static sites. I have a project which is audio-heavy and has used 2TB of bandwith since the start of January. It would have been about $180 of egress costs from S3, but routing it through the Cloudflare free tier CDN with an agressive caching policy has basically eliminated those costs.
Modern bandwidth charges is the most heinous modern scam against developers. Yes, great that Cloudflare has a free tier, but the cost of anything AWS shouldn't be the baseline, it's one of the more expensive options out there, especially their "premium" bandwidth.
I've had a dedicated server from Hetzner for 28 EUR/month, with no bandwidth costs and no metering. I currently host 20+ static websites + a bunch of other services from this host now, with no issues and performance is fantastic. So ends up being less then 1EUR/month per "thing" run on that server, and I don't contribute to making the web more "Cloudflare-only".
Thanks, I'll check out Hetzner. I'd been happy with NearlyFreeSpeech [0] until this project, who also don't charge for bandwidth, but for this project the audio files were orders of magnitude slower downloading from them than from S3 or Cloudflare. Maybe they throttle media downloads or something.
