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ID: eeUicAzE/biz/60654221#60658441
7/19/2025, 8:54:02 PM
>>60657875
ICP places the impetus of creating profitable apps onto the developer, just like traditional web infra. However, unlike traditional infra, self hosting is not a possibility, and the cloud hosting option is a monopoly that is infinitely more expensive than web2. A wise developer once told me that the best server to host your app on was an old computer sitting under a desk somewhere. This is not an option for ICP devs. Dfinity plan to remediate is to subsidize through programs like grants, ICP Hubs (huge waste of money), and now, the ICP Alliance (seems to be put on hold). Caffeine as a strategy makes at least partial sense as it helps to stimulate the deployment of apps onto the IC.
ICP has a serious cost issue for devs. The real prices buried deeply and not well-understood. You have to convert XDR to USD and then convert the unit of storage from gigabyte-seconds to an amount of time you can wrap your brain around. When you do this, you intuit that the costs are much higher compared to traditional cloud infra.
It costs $0.43 to store 1GB of data for 1 month on the IC Blockchain. For comparison, that is is about 20 times more expensive than Amazon S3, which costs $0.02 for 1GB per month.
It costs $0.28 to transfer 1 GB of data inter-canister (internally) on the IC Blockchain. For comparison, it costs $0.02 per gigabyte for an Inter-Region transfer on AWS, making ICP 14 times more expensive for moving data around globally. By the way intra-regional transfers on AWS are FREE!
HTTP outcalls on ICP are perhaps the most ludicrous expense. The request body is limited to 2MB length, as is the response body. So if you were being perfectly efficient with your data transfer off ICP you could transfer out 1 GB of egress data along with a maximum ingress of 1 GB of data with 512 HTTP outcalls. The cost of this is $0.27. For comparison, AWS charges nothing for ingress and $0.09 for egress. Forcing devs to pay to bring data on to the IC is a possible fatal flaw.
ICP places the impetus of creating profitable apps onto the developer, just like traditional web infra. However, unlike traditional infra, self hosting is not a possibility, and the cloud hosting option is a monopoly that is infinitely more expensive than web2. A wise developer once told me that the best server to host your app on was an old computer sitting under a desk somewhere. This is not an option for ICP devs. Dfinity plan to remediate is to subsidize through programs like grants, ICP Hubs (huge waste of money), and now, the ICP Alliance (seems to be put on hold). Caffeine as a strategy makes at least partial sense as it helps to stimulate the deployment of apps onto the IC.
ICP has a serious cost issue for devs. The real prices buried deeply and not well-understood. You have to convert XDR to USD and then convert the unit of storage from gigabyte-seconds to an amount of time you can wrap your brain around. When you do this, you intuit that the costs are much higher compared to traditional cloud infra.
It costs $0.43 to store 1GB of data for 1 month on the IC Blockchain. For comparison, that is is about 20 times more expensive than Amazon S3, which costs $0.02 for 1GB per month.
It costs $0.28 to transfer 1 GB of data inter-canister (internally) on the IC Blockchain. For comparison, it costs $0.02 per gigabyte for an Inter-Region transfer on AWS, making ICP 14 times more expensive for moving data around globally. By the way intra-regional transfers on AWS are FREE!
HTTP outcalls on ICP are perhaps the most ludicrous expense. The request body is limited to 2MB length, as is the response body. So if you were being perfectly efficient with your data transfer off ICP you could transfer out 1 GB of egress data along with a maximum ingress of 1 GB of data with 512 HTTP outcalls. The cost of this is $0.27. For comparison, AWS charges nothing for ingress and $0.09 for egress. Forcing devs to pay to bring data on to the IC is a possible fatal flaw.
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