That post refers to hosting an appview that does all the same things as the official bsky (the service) one, which involves a ton of storage and bandwidth and processing (for everyone’s recommendations, notifications, and all the other moving parts), and is closed source to boot.

Frontpage.fyi is a lot cheaper simply because its used by like 50 people tops.

There are already smaller appviews that use the existing hosting/authentication infra, but bypassing the bsky appview aggregation. Nothing with any real scale but for example there is a barebones reddit/hackernews equivalent https://frontpage.fyi/