i mean yeah if you have 500k users with 56 million function invocations per day, it is expensive on a service like vercel. if you want to scale you should choose cheap services
after using it for a year already, I really need this site to succeed. It's one of the few I'd happily pay money to use, even if I don't get anything back.
a while ago, before Bluesky or Cara or anything, a similar issue happened with a site called Hive iirc, it did a great job at fostering a userbase right away and things went great but because they couldn't keep the site up and also develop it, they decided to shutter the entire thing for a month and buckle down.... and it completely lost its entire userbase, its momentum was destroyed, everyone moved on. I don't want to see that happen to Cara.
I hope they implement some other situation soon. A one-time fee to register, maybe monthly subscriptions for perks, or something. They may need it sooner rather than later and at least this is a nice stopgap