It simply distributes those costs to users. For the users perspective, it's free (zero additional cost) assuming they already own a computer and pay for monthly flat rate unmetered internet.
For example, in 2016 a friend of mine and I made an electron app called WebTorrent Desktop. It has over a million downloads. The total bandwidth transfer so far is probably a lot--wild guess, maybe a few million dollars worth?
But it is free and open source and costs roughly $0 to run--just enough to keep the website up. That's the magic of decentralization--you're simply writing software. You're not running a service.
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Consider the total monthly internet bill of all Twitter users combined. Extremely rough guess, 500 mil montly actives * $40/mo for Comcast or something = $20b per month.
The crowd has more than enough bandwidth, disk space, and CPU cycles to run services at any scale. That's another magical aspect of dapps: the total resources available to the system automatically scale with the number of users. It's up to us to figure out how to harness it.
For example, in 2016 a friend of mine and I made an electron app called WebTorrent Desktop. It has over a million downloads. The total bandwidth transfer so far is probably a lot--wild guess, maybe a few million dollars worth?
But it is free and open source and costs roughly $0 to run--just enough to keep the website up. That's the magic of decentralization--you're simply writing software. You're not running a service.
--
Consider the total monthly internet bill of all Twitter users combined. Extremely rough guess, 500 mil montly actives * $40/mo for Comcast or something = $20b per month.
The crowd has more than enough bandwidth, disk space, and CPU cycles to run services at any scale. That's another magical aspect of dapps: the total resources available to the system automatically scale with the number of users. It's up to us to figure out how to harness it.