> I believe they sold exclusive servers as a benefit of their paid subscription. That'll quickly get expensive.

Ouch. If they are selling servers that cost more to run than they are getting from the sale, that's foolish and difficult to back out of.

If the servers don't cost more to run than they are getting from the sale, cost shouldn't be a problem as it's net income. Doesn't matter if it's expensive.

> Also, s3 quickly sums up if you host content and its difficult to replace.

It's a lot of work to replace S3 if it's deeply embedded in all the code, and especially if people have been linking directly to S3 buckets.

Depends how much data they are storing of course, but S3 migration can be done when there's a compelling need. It's not the cheapest storage around.

MinIO has an S3 compatible API: https://docs.min.io/docs/aws-cli-with-minio.html

So does B2 (Backblaze), since fairly recently.

Ceph too, would be much cheaper to operate your own server in a traditional server hosting company than AWS.