What's the price of free? 

So much of the web is free.  Free information. Free tutorials. Free services.  Free platforms.  Users expect everything to be free and unlimited.  

There's a cost to all of that, whether or not the cost is apparent to you (the end user).  The cost can be time, energy, and volunteer contributions by a user.  The cost can be hidden, through the selling of your user data, privacy, and location  The cost can also be redistributed: some users pay for everyone else.  

The cost of free is something that's always been a struggle for our website.  I've always prided the website on being free with common sense limits.  When I first started collecting photos (and even today), it was only by the generosity of others that I was able to collect such a large collection so quickly --  remaining freely accessible will always be a guiding principle of the website.  We will always freely share as much as possible in the most cost efficient manner.  There are limits though.  

Paying for all of our critical services - from the software to the server - unfortunately isn't free.  And for a media rich website like ours that delivers terabytes of images and files, our costs for storage and bandwidth are increasing every month in parallel with our success. There's a real monetary cost every month.  Things aren't actually free.  

When you join a website like Facebook for "free," there's another kind of cost.  As the saying goes, if you're not being sold to, you're the product.  You're selling your behavioral data, your educational level, your projected income, your location, your browsing history, and your ability to targeted to by thousands of advertisers.   You're being sold, in bits and bytes.  

I'm not ready to sell everyone's user data to offer a free platform. I would rather I be upfront and honest: you're going to contribute X to receive Y. It's clear and simple, in which both parties are aware of what's involved.  

On our website, we depend on two kinds of "payments. " The first payment is user contributions like posts, images, and albums from Champions, who voluntarily pay It forward with their time and energy.   The second payment is the VIP Olympian program, which allows certain individuals to financially underwrite the monetary costs for everyone. 

I'm indebted to both groups, who provide the content and money to completely cover the community.  

If you're not a contributor or a VIP Olympian, I'd like to encourage you to become one.  Our community would not survive without the continued support of these two groups of people.