We've run Podping since mid 2021 (I'm just looking now and the proof of concept code I wrote was on Github in March 2021 https://github.com/brianoflondon/hive-hydra )

If we think about running perhaps 3 x $200 per month servers for 1.5 years We could easily be looking at having spent the value of Hive now in use.

As it is the 5 main machines (mostly for redundancy and 3 would be fine) doing sending the podpings are $5 per month each and even that expense could be done away with by moving those functions into the actual Podcasting Hosts but there's no real need.

Yes, on the ingestion side, there is definitely a far lesser need for servers to scan for changes and this would be huge if Apple, Google and Spotify joined the party and watched Podping on Hive.