Andrew Torba ✝️ on Gab: 'Starting in March, media uploads on Gab will be a privilege reserved for GabPRO, Verified, Donor, and Investor users. We will no longer be supporting free media uploads and hosting huge amounts of data for free. Let me explain why.
As you all know Gab has to maintain our own in-house infrastructure because we have been banned from all cloud hosting providers. Over the past year we've had so much data uploaded, largely from free users, that we have to purchase more storage and spend our precious and limited engineering resources trying to expand our infrastructure storage. We've also faced an onslaught of bot accounts over the past few months that we believe are purposely uploading tons of media files on purpose to flood our storage space.
Finally, there are many real users who have been here for years and posted tens of thousands of times and have 10-100GB+ of media stored on Gab's drives for free. Add those all up and it becomes extremely costly to maintain.
We can't do it anymore. Every user will be able to speak freely with words, but if you want the privilege of Gab hosting and an endless stream of large images and videos you'll need to help support the service. It's just that simple. PRO, Verified, Donor, and Investor users will notice no change when this happens, things will continue as normal for you. Everyone else will need to upgrade to PRO to unlock the privilege of posting media files on Gab. https://pro.gab.com'