[noirscape]

Sourcehut is a bit of an oddball though - it's mostly profitable because it's not a free service. As in, if you want to host your product at sourcehut, Drew expects (but doesn't force) you to pay for it[0]. Contributing is free though.

Also helping sourcehut is that it's actual deployment process is uh... Interesting? It's expecting to run on Alpine (and not dockerized Alpine) and you need to be able to supply an email server. The latter especially means that the usual problem of "FOSS hosting with a price label" doesn't really pop up; nobody is going to bother cloning sourcehuts deployment setup without the fees attached because very few people want to selfhost email for a personal instance of FOSS software. (Since self-hosting email is rather annoying for maintenance since your server IP can end up in random blacklists and you won't know until the setup stops working, and sourcehut relies a lot on email.)

[0]: https://man.sr.ht/billing-faq.md - seems to mostly be on a "were not gonna be jerks about it" - "if you're so poor you can't pay for sourcehut on the price given, send me an email and we'll work something out" basis - the goal doesn't seem to be to extract profit from every user and "fuck poor people", which is quite respectable if you ask me.

[tm-guimaraes]

> it's mostly profitable because it's not a free service.

I don't understand what you mean from this. What service doesn't charge? Either demos/trial versions, or they are actually charging someone else for your activity.

> Interesting? It's expecting to run on Alpine (and not dockerized Alpine)

there's still pleaty of admins who do preferer to not use containers. Conterners shine on "cattle" deployments, if you can get away with pets, that's not really something weird out of the enterprise or new age stuff.

> and sourcehut relies a lot on email.

well, it's literally a service to contribute by email, it would be weird if it wasn't like that.