No, development is not a running cost. It's a development cost, that may be sponsored (as was done with Keet), or paid as an investment by a company that *does* plan to make revenue from a P2P app (with still zero running costs), or donated by individual contributors.

The difference between development costs (even ongoing ones) and running costs is that running costs scale with number of users on the platform. If you have 4 billion users your running costs are substantial on a server based system. They are still zero on a P2P platform.



as far as i know, Keet required years of development (and will continue to need upgrades over time like all software). isn’t that a running cost?

Certainly not an unbiased review but maybe useful as an overview is [the recent series](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEZwCXa1K8Q629mWmpcSYCVMDoi0s8hzI) of short video tutorials in which the Holepunch team demonstrate building an app with the Pear runtime.

But yeah, if I come across an unbaised review I'll submit it to SN.

I'm gonna have to do a deep dive on holepunch. I've learned to never give anything the benefit of the doubt, and the website makes me think of a shitcoin designed to be a self-propagating virus.

Let me know if you have come across and non biased reviews or overviews... 

joda

Yes, [Keet](https://keet.io/), and other apps that will be built on the recently released [Pear runtime](https://pears.com/).

Keet runs on *zero* infrastructure. No servers and no relays (unlike Nostr). The only thing that the developers have done to get the P2P network up and going is to run a few instances themselves, and it's from specially signed instances (again, not servers) that updates to the software are propagated.

The Bitcoin chat room on Keet currently has over 1400 members and the chat is 'hosted' or shared across those members devices (mainly phones and some desktops). No servers, no running costs.

arrivederci

charts_and_numbers

How much do social media apps make from each user?

you had me until the last sentence.

can you share an example of any system that incurs no running costs?