The others have said similar things though. Not trying to be a downer but it seems like there is something else that causes these people to all stop.
For example, I imagine it wouldn't be hard for a big competitor to burn through that 5 terabytes if they wanted to cause you grief. They have millions of dollars to burn to gain more.
The griefing aspect isn't something I've thought of. I would definitely monetize at that point and ask that he pay his $5. At that point I'm break even.
It's not even Imgur I would suspect of something like that really. There's a lot of money invested into deplatforming certain demographics right now and you might even get people with the wrong mindset or lacking reason deciding what is targeted and what isn't.
So /u/cats has said that cost is the biggest thing giving him trouble. I've looked at his numbers and it's clear he doesn't have access to cheaper boxes like I do, and doesn't know how to buy VPS with different attributes and create distributed file serves that take advantage of the cheap aspects of different offers. There is mega cheap storage out there and there is mega mega cheap bandwidth.
The other thing that guarantees that it is less likely to disappear is that it's part of a broader project. The project offers it's users access to key value stores of varying privacy vs public and in string:string associations and string:file associations. The project also lets users write custom code to access those value stores. That's a really key part to my JSOS project that isn't going away any time soon because a lot of projects depend on it at this point. That's all this app is. Just one more app coded on the front end https://js.lifelist.pw/u/upload
Then the other thing is that jsos is meant to be monetized at some point targeting storage specifically as a metric aiming for like the top 30 percentile of daily unique users in terms of storage use. That's going to be like 1% of actual users. If I charge people who use 50 gigabytes plus $5 per month I would be making a 20000% margin. Might as well offer 100 gigs for free. It's not like I'm under some huge cost pressure. I'm paying $5 a month to run this plus a lot else with it and if I actually tried I could get this to $2. /u/cats says he's spending hundreds a month. I'm sorry I happen to be better at researching vps's than him.
Well I know that up to about 5 terabytes I have no variable cost. So we'll see.