Servers do cost money, but storing large amounts of data for upload and download, and keeping them backed up does not cost anywhere near that, unless you have extremely vast quantities of data.
Something I run streams ~200GB/day from a ~1.5TB (and growing) data collection that is highly replicated by the data store. It costs me less than 10USD/month.
It is also all automated - I don't need to touch it unless something goes wrong, which might be once every six months.
Thats what you pay in a private setting when you do it by yourself.
I can do from bare metal to frontend everything. That still doesn't mean that if i need to pay someone doing that, its 10$/month.
When you grow from 'i do that in my time with my ressources and i'm not paying myself anything' to 'i now have an employee and that person actually needs real money every month' you pay more then 10$/month.
Servers do cost money, but storing large amounts of data for upload and download, and keeping them backed up does not cost anywhere near that, unless you have extremely vast quantities of data.
Something I run streams ~200GB/day from a ~1.5TB (and growing) data collection that is highly replicated by the data store. It costs me less than 10USD/month.
It is also all automated - I don't need to touch it unless something goes wrong, which might be once every six months.