I pay around 10USD for the VPS hosting my personal email and "cloud" services and I'm fairly confident that I could run a mastodon instance there too. Of course

I pay around 10USD for the VPS hosting my personal email and "cloud" services and I'm fairly confident that I could run a mastodon instance there too. Of course I'm cheating here on the management/personel cost, but the operating expenses could easily (and do) host a larger user population (and will go down with scale) and you won't need a lot of personel either. So I don't know why Jimmy Wales needs to charge 10$ for his network if he's only interested in sustainable operation. If it's the early adopter package for development expenses, I'm all in, but I don't know how he shouldn't eventually get away with 1 Mio. users paying 10$/per year if he doesn't intend to market it as a a startup/make money in successful startup scales.