How should developers make money to cover cost of EOS CPU, bandwidth, and RAM?

Question

So EOS puts the cost of transactions and storage onto the developers. ETH puts the cost onto users.

Because these are decentralized apps, in theory, no one should be making a lot of money off of them. The whole point of dApps is that there's no central authority such as a Quora making money off of your answers.

Suppose that I want to create a Quora competitor on the EOS platform. You get paid when your answers get upvoted.

That means as a developer, not only do I have to pay AWS to host my Quora clone, I have to stake my EOS token to pay for the transaction cost. All the while, I can't make any money off of my users because it's decentralized.

So now, the only way I can make money is to perhaps sell my KnowledgeCoin that I created and airdropped. But there's only a finite amount of them. What if I run out of KnowledgeCoin to sell one day to cover the cost of operating the business and the cost of EOS transactions?

Please help me understand the incentive for developers here.

Answer 1

Several things:

• You can setup your contract such that users pay for the RAM they use;
• You can require an on-chain fee in EOS from users or off-chain fees when people sign up to your service;
• You only need to pay for AWS/cloud storage if you're storing significant off-chain data that you can't store locally and you can't use the upcoming IPFS integration (in which case your RAM requirements decrease); otherwise on-chain data is already paid for in RAM and stored by nodes;
• In your example, KnowledgeCoin does not need to be finite--uncapped cryptocurrencies with scheduled emission are very common. Note, however, that creating a cryptocurrency does not create money out of thin air--you need to create some form of subjective value.
• Decentralisation is a complex concept that applies to many areas including infrastructure, architecture, governance, and revenue, so rules of thumbs such as "no one should be making a lot of money off of [dapp]," need not to be universal to everyone.

Overall, I don't believe EOS attempts to solve funding problems by itself--it provides options for devs to integrate more extensible on-chain funding mechanisms that are not possible on other platforms. If a project can afford the luxury to run a service for no fees to their users or customers, they can do that; otherwise, they need to adopt a business plan that suits their needs.