Hive is decentralized at the blockchain level but people do not experience Hive through blocks and transaction hashes alone.
They experience it through apps, mobile clients, wallets, image hosting, search, APIs, notifications, onboarding flows, support channels, and reliable infrastructure that works every day.
That layer has a real cost.
Over the past weeks we shared several posts about Ecency's proposal, our operational transparency, what Ecency does beyond the app, and how our work benefits Hive. We also followed the recent community discussion around HIVE price, DHF spending, sustainability, and whether frontends should be expected to generate more of their own revenue.
The discussion is uncomfortable, but fair.
DHF is not free money. Every proposal creates a cost for the ecosystem, especially in a weak market. Every funded team, including us, should be able to explain what value it creates, what it costs, what can be reduced, and what the tradeoffs are.
So we are making a change.
We are reducing our intended daily ask from 333 HBD/day to 250 HBD/day.
This means we will also scale down parts of our infrastructure commitment and operational footprint. We will keep prioritizing the systems that matter most for Hive's resilience and user access, but we will have to make harder choices about capacity, redundancy, support load, and development speed.
It is the reality of operating in the current market. If the community wants smaller DHF obligations, projects have to become smaller, slower, more selective, or more dependent on outside revenue.
Ecency is no exception.
What We Will Prioritize
Ecency is not only a frontend.
We maintain web and mobile apps, onboarding flows, user support, open-source SDK/rendering/wallet tooling, image hosting, Hive RPC access, search/indexing, signing-related services, and other infrastructure that users and sometimes other apps depend on.
With a reduced ask, our priority will be to preserve the most important layers:
Keeping Ecency web and mobile usable and maintained
Maintaining critical publishing, wallet, and account flows
Keeping essential image availability and media delivery working
Maintaining reliable Hive access through our own infrastructure where it matters most
Continuing security, abuse prevention, and anti-fraud work
Keeping core open-source packages and frontend code available for the ecosystem
Supporting users at a reduced but still responsible level
Some lower-priority infrastructure, extra capacity, experiments, and convenience layers may have to be reduced, delayed, simplified, or moved to more cost-conscious setups.
That is the direct consequence of scaling down.
Why Not Just Use Other Services?
Ecency could reduce costs by relying more heavily on outside services.
We could depend more on other image hosts. We could depend more on other public nodes. We could push more responsibility to third-party infrastructure and remove more of that cost from our own balance sheet.
That would be cheaper for Ecency in the short term.
But it would not necessarily make Hive stronger.
When Hive apps depend too much on a few external services, the ecosystem becomes more fragile. If an image host disappears, old content breaks. If a public node is overloaded or unavailable, users cannot interact smoothly. If search, APIs, authentication, or media delivery are controlled by too few operators, the platform gains hidden single points of failure.
That is not the resilience Hive should aim for.
This is why Ecency has continued to run and maintain key infrastructure ourselves. It is not the cheapest path, but it has been the more resilient path.
With the reduced ask, we will keep that principle where it matters most, but we will also be more aggressive about reducing cost and accepting some tradeoffs.
Open Source Does Not Pay Server Bills
We keep most of our work open source because that is aligned with Hive.
Open source means the community can inspect the code, fork it, improve it, run its own instance, or build on top of it. That is healthy. It prevents lock-in. It gives the community options.
But open source does not mean free to operate.
The code can be public, but the servers still have monthly bills. The systems still need monitoring. Abuse still needs to be handled. Images still need storage and bandwidth. Nodes still need maintenance. Users still need support. Releases still need testing, security work, and ongoing development.
There are also hidden costs that rarely show up in simple infrastructure comparisons.
Running a front-facing application with user-generated content means dealing with abuse, fraud, moderation pressure, DMCA and legal requests, account recovery, user mistakes, and sometimes legal exposure. We have already faced UGC-related legal costs, including a Lithuanian court case that cost roughly 15,000 EUR unexpectedly. That money would otherwise have supported development and infrastructure.
These are not theoretical costs. They are part of operating a real public application.
Revenue Matters
Some people reasonably ask why apps and frontends do not simply generate enough revenue to cover everything themselves.
We agree that revenue matters.
We are actively exploring and building paths such as hive-x402, AI credits, Ecency Points, self-hosted Vision-Next/community deployments, and other service-level models. We are not against business models, paid features, ads, services, or external income.
But we also want to be honest: none of those currently covers the real cost of operating everything at production scale.
There is also a reality specific to open-source public goods: much of the value Ecency creates is intentionally shared with the whole Hive ecosystem.
When we improve onboarding, Hive benefits.
When we keep images available, Hive content benefits.
When we improve SEO and server rendering, Hive authors benefit.
When we maintain open-source SDKs, rendering tools, wallets, and frontend code, other builders benefit.
When we operate infrastructure instead of depending entirely on outside parties, Hive becomes more resilient.
Those benefits are real, even when they are not fully captured as Ecency revenue.
That said, the team cannot depend on hope forever. If Hive and Ecency cannot sustain full-time work at the current level, then we have to look for other revenue sources, other jobs, or a much smaller operating model. That is not dramatic. It is just reality.
What If Ecency Becomes a Hobby-Level Project?
That is also an option.
Ecency can continue existing as an open-source project with slower development, reduced infrastructure, lower support expectations, and a smaller team commitment. The community can run instances. Contributors can fork the code. Content rewards, donations, paid services, and future revenue experiments can support some of the work.
But that version of Ecency would not be the same as the current one.
It would mean fewer guarantees, slower response times, less redundancy, reduced infrastructure responsibility, and fewer people able to spend full-time energy on Hive.
That may be what the community wants. If so, we should be honest about it.
Hive cannot ask projects to operate like full-time infrastructure providers while funding them like hobby projects. Both paths are valid, but they lead to different outcomes.
The Choice
DHF support is not charity. It is not a reward for past effort. It is a community decision about what infrastructure, software, and public goods are worth sustaining.
If the community wants reliable open-source frontends, independent infrastructure, strong onboarding, long-term content availability, and teams that keep building and maintaining through difficult markets, then some of that has to be treated as shared infrastructure.
If the community does not see enough value in that, then projects like ours must reduce infrastructure, externalize more services, slow development, and shift more responsibility to community-run instances or outside revenue.
That is the tradeoff.
We have reduced costs, reduced team size, published transparency reports, answered proposal questions, kept development open, and continued shipping across web, mobile, wallet, onboarding, infrastructure, and ecosystem tooling.
Now we are reducing the ask further to 250 HBD/day and adjusting our commitments accordingly.
We will continue to work for Hive because we believe Hive still matters. But we also have to be realistic about what can be sustained.
If you believe Hive needs reliable open-source frontends, independent infrastructure, strong onboarding, long-term content availability, and fewer ecosystem-level single points of failure, please consider supporting Ecency's revised proposal direction.
Proposal #379:
https://ecency.com/proposals/379
Transparency:
Open source gives the community freedom.
Community support keeps that freedom usable.
Times are tough, and we’re facing some big decisions, and we don’t know if $Hive has hit bottom yet. But I hope everything will turn out okay.
Todo va salir bien ya verás no es solo hive ..btc ha bajado mucho
Thank you for the support. These are difficult tradeoffs, but we think it is better to be transparent now and adjust responsibly.
Open source doesn't mean "never make revenue". I think it could be so easy to make even at this shit market 5k revenue with ecency. Monetize some parts am it works.
I know that would be a business, maybe you dont want to run one.
But at the end to depend 100% on DAO money forever will not work out. And yes Ecency is one of the better proposals, Hivewatchers is 100x worse, runs for years, protect what exactly? Shit content? Well i only see shit content on hive.
And cost way to much for it.
But the point is all "forever" proposals are waste. The 90k Bailout retroactive pay was also a waste ( special at all time low).
Everyone can build software, at the end 99% becomes useless. 1% can survive and this is the 1% makes money. Everything else is a expensive hobby.
Agree. Open source does not mean "never make revenue" and depending only on DAO funding forever is not healthy.
We already have some revenue from paid onboarding and Points sales, but it is still small, roughly 100-150 EUR/month, which is only a fraction of infrastructure and development cost.
The goal is to grow that with more creative revenue paths: paid services, AI Credits, Points, hive-x402, self-hosted/community instances, and other useful tools. But we want to do it without selling user data, invasive tracking, or compromising user privacy.
So the direction is: reduce the DHF ask now, scale commitments accordingly, and keep moving more cost toward revenue where it makes sense.
@crimsonclad is the exchange whisperer right? Some low hanging fruit is simple banners of exchanges on people that not logged in. So people from outside ( google and co) see this. And ofc other affiliate + paid spaces. Thats super simple ( non targeted) revenue stream.
And if you want to build something unique, build a decentralized facebook like advertisement interface. OFC thats a lot of work, but this makes also real money ( beyond hive, people sign up with their website and get paid tracked encrypted on Blockchain).
Every semi big website had to deal with a scam referral program and vise versa. This solves a real problem, reaches beyond hive to monetize websites ( without reward pool) and makes on hive websites also revenue.
This would be worth funding with large $ if the research and architecture is smart. And if something should get funded, it should pay X% back to DAO ( I think all projects should offer a return in some way).
The problem is, DAO for outsiders feels like communism in some way to reward friends of the leadership and even a 1M vote does nothing.
Advertisement is the way to go ( also for Hive projects like the AI credits).
And well the AI credits can fail fast too, if demand is not there and people offer hardware nobody pays. This needs again marketing.
The idea of launch a product and people will find it is retarded and was NEVER true.
Btw in context to other comment i am to lazy to edit. Imagine Hive would have a natural demand to "burn" or "buyback" around 10k USD a month, that would be a good start.
And Hive needs in a long run a way to monetize RC / Blockspace. Retards on Hive fight "low quality content". Well since is objective, they fight users ( i dont talk about obvious scams and spam, even if this is the reaction from the curation ppl).
Non editable AI communication could be huge ( but should be rewarded IMO since this would make it unique).
Github like Code but onchain.
And so on. But at the end as long the space is worthless and highly moderated, is like using reddit without users.
Realistically, this is a tough time for all projects. Ecency’s decision to adjust its costs and commitments transparently is a responsible step. Personally, I appreciate this action by Ecency, and I hope all frontends will take this into consideration.
Tough times but @ecency is tougher 💪. We can be tougher together as a community. Great times are coming and we'll just keep going !BBH !PIZZA
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Nice
Excelente información muy completa
it might be open source but the servers it runs on often require monthly payment to keep them running.