Reddit pays admins, I think we are mostly on the same page on the rest. Donations will never happen though. It’s going to be at least $100 a year per person+ unless you end up cutting corners on stability and I don’t see the user base accepting that really.

Reddit pays people.

Unless this place monetizes its done. But everyone in this place expects everything to be free.

Nah, unless you have a super popular app or suck down bandwidth I rarely find the costs of AWS exceed the labor of a good sysadmin.