Decentralization is not resource-efficient and its cost per unit will be always higher than any centralized alternative. That is a given. It is the cost of having all that redundancy and flexibility. You can not reach economies of scale easily.
With that said, I believe prices will go down for B2C. A few reasons why I believe so:
- Some of these services will consolidate into larger offerings and make a more featureful service. Pixelfed is already experimenting with a different frontend where users can share more than just photos (UI-wise, it looks a lot like early/cool Tumblr)
- A larger number of professional providers that will run instances in the same way that people were running email providers. With Communick I can run Matrix, Mastodon and XMPP and I am charging $5/10 users/3 months during the "soft launch/beta" phase, which is basically $0.17/user/month and will let me hit break even point with less than a hundred paid accounts. I can increase this 10-fold and it still wouldn't be as expensive as any of the current major providers.
- Media storage costs completely dominate the rest of other infra expenses, and IPFS can save the day here. It's not hard to imagine an architecture where servers provide only a cache layer for media serving and the less-accessed data lives on users' clients.
- The real money is in hosting for business/enterprise/white-labeling anyway. As much as I want Communick to be successful and I hope I start getting more people to "get it", I am using it as lab to make sure that I can offer a reliable media presence / communication service for companies, and then "Communick B2C" would be mostly a loss-leader.