I agree, it needs to be much more cost-effective. Someone In The Know told me that there's some attempts being made to make it more cost-effective with something called Optimism (https://twitter.com/optimismPBC) - but after looking into it, it does seem like you'd need to buy tokens. I specifically wanted this Game of Life to be driven by ETH!
You don't need to share of course but I am curious - is your contract a more "legitimate" use than mine? Something which is a genuine utility?
Thanks for reading btw!
My contract was more traditional. We needed to mint NFT and sell them in a single transaction. Normally an NFT is minted and transferred then the user can sell it to other people later. In our case, we were selling a very specific asset that demanded payment before (or at the same time) as the NFT was being minted. So I wrote an ERC721 contract that also included Escrow payment capabilities.
It was definitely a good experience, but if I was doing this on my own and not for my job, there’s no way I’d pay almost $300 to deploy a smart contract.