Instagram costs around 12€/month if you don't agree to targeted ads (EU).
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2026
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No Stupid Questions
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We don't have to talk in hypotheticals. Mastodon is free. Signal is free. Linux is free. The cost is zero. Yes they all get money from donations and from commercial contracts, but it's absolutely possible to run services like these without squeezing every last pfennig out of every user.
Linux is subsidized by a consortium of major tech companies supporting a common code base as it is cheaper than relying on one vendor.
Signal is run by a non-profit group which is funded by various grants.
Mastodon is a combination of above, the code being subsidized by a consortium of developers and individual servers funded by various means.
To just say "it is free" ignores the economics of why they are free.
The cost of those to the service provider is generally not zero though. And cost is per user, and these all have fewer users than mainstream social media and "services".
Though Linux is an exception here, with it costing only the time of hobbyists (at least as far as I know)
You asked how much it would cost to use. The existence of these smaller services proves that the answer can be as low as free, if someone wants a thing to exist and is willing to cover the cost of hosting it (which can be as low as buying a Raspberry Pi, assuming you already have internet).
Fair!
But that's never the end of the story.
Look at Hulu. It started free with ads, them went to paid, no ads, then went to paid with ads and pay more for no ads. When it comes to sources of revenue, it's never this or that, it's this AND that and keep looking for another.
It gets more complicated when you have to factor in profit...and then shareholders...and then demands for exponential growth. That makes it harder to estimate how much is costs, how much is greed.
(Not that all of this should be free or delivered at cost, necessarily -- it's healthy for people to be able to make a living off of products or services they provide)
If ads weren't obtrusive and deceptive, I wouldn't feel the need to block them.
It's hard to tell, because companies that make their money from ad revenue also spend a lot making their apps more addictive in order to sell you more ads.
You can tell that they are making less than whatever their premium costs though, so for example YouTube makes less than $8/month selling ads.
If people aren't trying to sell you shit, and don't have to make their website more addictive it's relatively cheap to run, for example Wikipedia that has a pretty dynamic read/write load, get 11 billion unique devices a year on just the English site https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/siteviews/?platform=all-sites&source=unique-devices&start=2025-04&end=2026-03&sites=en.wikipedia.org which is about half of the page views: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/01/13/wikipedia-at-25-what-the-data-tells-us/ but spends ~$180m/year across all languages, so it costs about 1c a year/unique device if I'm doing my math right.
Obviously some service like YouTube will cost more because it uses more bandwidth and Gmail will cost more because each user is served individual emails and spam filtering has always been CPU intensive, but the hardware costs are fairly minimal anyway (most of the cost is on staff), so if it wasn't for the ads Google would have less staff and hosting their services would be much cheaper, maybe not 1c/year but almost certainly less than $1
Obviously Lemmy instances are currently much smaller than reddit, but I'd bet by unique user count Lemmy instances are likely running far more effectively than reddit and likely in the sub dollar category.
On the flip side if you want to make something a subscription only service you need to spend a bunch of money processing payments and subscriptions, probably more than the actual hosting costs.
It's a question that doesn't have a simple answer (even with publicly available data), but for the individual, it wouldn't be much if the service was decentralized and the burden of hosting is placed on the user or a small community (think about how most game servers work that can host tens or hundreds of players by community members out of a surplus PC or cheap VPS, or something like a forum for a small website), but the issue is once we factor in scale to the equation.
If Youtube became a paid subscription, a majority of the userbase would cease using the platform overnight (and single-pay is outright unsustainable due to the costs of being a hosting platform for video content), and it's more than likely that users would turn to piracy or sharing accounts rather than paying the fee directly.
Windows does have a one time license fee, but their issue is less about monetization and more about monopolistic enshittification. The only cure for that is owning what you buy and not having centralized control, which is only seen in open source/free software platforms such as Linux Distros.
Facebook has the same issue as Youtube to a degree, and largely is sustainable purely due to the network effect brought by the low entry cost of $0 to the user (despite being able to make plenty of money off them through telemetry and ads). A price tag of any sort would break their model as well, along with any other social media platform such as Snapchat.
tl;dr: the only reason the current incumbent platforms are profiting to begin with is because they have a "free but at a hidden cost" as their entire business model, so any price above $0 erases their userbase and relevance, along with being unsustainable for their current infrastructure.
YouTube costs, what, $25 per month to not show ads?
I reckon Facebook and instagram would be in the same range.
YouTube costs $8/month to not show ads.
And it is also bundled with an ad-free music service.
Remember that infinite-greed is part of the equation, though..
IF revenue MUST increase, no matter what the cost-to-the-world, THEN .. the example of covid supermarket-profits-skyrocketing, while people couldn't afford food, comes to mind..
That is part of the problem with concentration-of-wealth-archy paradigm & moneyarchy paradigm: they've both got infinities in their goals, that is infinite-concentration-of-wealth, & that breaks civilization's viability.
The 2 equation-classes are incompatible.
Public-benefit-companies are where we ought be, but .. there isn't even that category of incorporation in Canada, ttbomk..
We, globally, have NOT been solving the right problems..
Internet-itself, & social-discussion-forum ought be considered required-civil-infrastructure, removing it from narcissistic-depravity's control, .. but nobody's got the spine to understand that countries are automatically highjacked, otherwise, by the platforms that the country's social-nervous-system is.
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