I think it is completely reasonable to charge for hot linking. There are only two problems: - Hot-linking seems to be one of the main use cases people have for

I think it is completely reasonable to charge for hot linking. There are only two problems: - Hot-linking seems to be one of the main use cases people have for their service so they are disabling a use case that people have relied on for years (making a free service no longer free is always harder than charging from day one) - This is significantly more expensive to most people than just using AWS S3 or similar. It's just one easy to write / follow AWS tutorial or micro-app away from being obsolete.