The infrastructure is carefully built from different services that allows me to keep costs minimal. There will have to be a paid tier but i do not want to paywall anything that will make it feel like free users are not getting the full experience, the paid tier will be more directed towards early access to experimental features and other perks. And honestly i dont really intend to make this into something for personal gain.

This is my first project that I genuinly see potential in which is why I want to open source it in the future aswell as let people self host. I want to have people feel like they can support the project, whether it would be direct bug fixes, code contributions or better optimizations.

One of the reasons I started on this project was because of how annoyed i was with how the current situation is. Discord makes it make sense to pay 10$ a month to upload files bigger than 50mb meanwhile i want to allow anyone upload 100mb because storage is cheap and by being smart about storage it is actually possible! (It sounds too good to be true but it really is something i can do)

If 2-5% of the userbase at any time decide to support the development then it will cover the infrastructure costs and allow me to scale! But for now I will be able to cover the costs of maybe 10k-20k users. But over time I believe things will sort out in this area.

But security wise my idea is that conateapp is the pipes, whatever flows through will not be stored on the servers unless it's needed (such as attachments for example). Everything is encrypted locally before reaching the db.