I don't get the $8/month. If you would pay for verification, that would be a one time payment. If the creators would be payed, then this might be fine, but they

I don't get the $8/month. If you would pay for verification, that would be a one time payment. If the creators would be payed, then this might be fine, but they aren't. So it is only a fee to use the infrastructure. You get a decent VPS for 8€/month, that has more computing power and bandwidth and storage that one person can use per month compared to what they would use on their systems for just streaming some videos and getting some messages. Sure I don't calculate here the cost for development and maintenance, but this cost is mostly constant with numbers of active users.