memes

You're paying for the content in the case of the newspapers. It is a similar cost to print on newsprint as to run a website. It saves them no money. Most of what you are paying for is for the journalism, writing, editing, etc. Content costs money.

This is the point here.

Many people have no idea of the infrastructure and costs needed to run many of these servers that provide services to people.

I disagree with things like Adobe basically using it for DRM but have no issue for services that are literally serving millions of people and providing something worthwhile that the majority of the population would otherwise not know how to do on their own.

There is some nuance to it, like offering a service and then slowly creeping costs up or adding an advertisement tier and dropping everyone to that etc is crap. But in general, if they are providing a decent service then I don't really have a problem with it.

I agree that ongoing infrastructure costs money, but several years of that should be included in the original estimate and pricing for the sale of the product. Plan for the sale price being cost to make+5 years of estimated maintenance for base product+profit margin. Then extend maintenance with each DLC if any. If no dlc then offer subscription to pay for servers and other infrastructure, if subscriptions fail to cover that then sunset the product but open source the server infrastructure so the community can pay to run it if desired.