Just to derail the conversation further, I've had a thought for that too - one I'm working up the courage to build myself :D I'm going to presume a few things

Just to derail the conversation further, I've had a thought for that too - one I'm working up the courage to build myself :D I'm going to presume a few things to keep this short: free and advertising-supported, donation-based, and paid for. I'm focussed on the third option. Ever notice how many new (typically closed) services are "just the price of a cup of coffee a month"? What happens when I want 20 of these "coffee-priced" services? That's more than I personally spend on actual, gourmet coffee a month (of which I buy copious amounts). I think there's a decent gap for services that cost $/€/£1/month. The volume of subscriptions at that price point might break even with the profitability of higher subscriptions with a lower volume. It might not of course - but I'm tempted to try it. Mail for $1 a month. Not remotely profitable, but with elastic compute and high volume of customers...maybe. With a self hosted option to boot, to lure in the early adopters and convert them when they want to offload the hassle of running the service... I don't intend to compete with free, but I definitely think there's room for innovation here. I have a day job, but I'd drop that in a second if there was an opportunity to manage a multi-tenant cloud of Nextcloud instances for customers that a) doesn't cost more than DigitalOcean, and b) had other software bundled at the same price point, e.g. Collabora Online, LDAP auth, Mattermost, Mediawiki, etc. etc. All for $5 instead of $5 x n services.... :shrug: maybe I'm too much of an idealist ;)