How Vaults stays online without subscriptions

Vaults is engineered so that each visit costs us almost nothing. The frontend is served from an edge network with aggressive caching, media is embedded from third party hosts instead of stored by us, and the database only ships a tiny JSON payload per page view. That is why a €5 one time payment is enough to keep the lights on forever.

The whole website is deployed on Vercel's edge network. That means the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, fonts and icons are cached in data centers close to your visitors and served without touching our origin. When somebody opens a Vaults page, most of what they download never hits our database at all.

We also use Vercel's build plugins for image optimization, prefetching and route level code splitting, so browsers only download the exact code that page needs.

Backgrounds, videos, music and site icons are always embedded via URLs to the hosts that already serve them (YouTube, SoundCloud, Imgur, Catbox, and so on). We do not store the original files. This is the single biggest cost saver: media bandwidth stays with the hosts that were designed for it, and our storage bill stays flat no matter how many videos or songs users add.

The only file we actually store is a small profile picture, because it needs to be tiny and instantly available.

A user can have several pages on one account. Every extra page is just a small row in the database with its own settings, links and blocks. Loading another page is another tiny JSON fetch, comparable in size to loading a single tweet. It does not multiply our costs in any meaningful way.

On top of the €5 lifetime and €9.99 supporter tiers, we run a username marketplace where rare handles can be listed and sold. Every marketplace sale contributes to keeping the service alive, so even in a world where nobody ever upgraded, Vaults would still cover its infrastructure through handle sales.

This is why we promise the price stays €5 forever. The math already works.

You never see ads, you never pay a subscription, and your profile stays online for as long as Vaults exists. The site is built to be cheap to run on purpose so that we can keep that promise.