[Zambyte]

> We run a full AppView + PDS + Relay for ~$1,772/mo. PDS is cheap (~$0.03/user/mo, 4 vCPUs, 32GB RAM). AppView is the expensive part; indexes the entire network (16TB DB), not just your users. Storage scales linearly with network activity. PDS scales linearly with your account count.

Source, Rudy, the creator of Blacksky: https://bsky.app/profile/rude1.blacksky.team/post/3mgpvknv4i...

The thing that makes ATproto nice and decentralized is that PDSs are decoupled from the application itself. Anyone can run a separate AppView, and just a handful of AppViews is enough to give people meaningful choice on ATproto, with the benefit of being much more approachable than ActivityPub for people who are not technically inclined.