His long term plan as his post mentions, is to grow and push IRC so that we can support large communities on IRC instead of them migrating to closed platforms.

His long term plan as his post mentions, is to grow and push IRC so that we can support large communities on IRC instead of them migrating to closed platforms. It's not normal for a businessman to spend so much money on this type of plan, I perfectly agree. But I've seen it happen, along with other IRC and open source projects that have nothing to do with LTM. See here for all the open source projects that a VPN supports without anything coming from it. https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/companies-we-sponsor https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/companies-we-spo... As for running a large IRC network, it's not just about the cost. It's the management, the running of the network, dealing with its users, etc. Protecting yourself from DDOS that still unfortunately happens amongst other attacks. It's not as simple as throwing it on "AWS/GCP for hobby scale money". (I say say that even though I don't run freenode).