system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: With recent news of Vine shutting down.. what costs go into keeping a platform like Vine or Blab going? The app is already there, if its not profitable quit wasting more money developing/growing it, but just leave as is and let the users still be able to make content, why COMPLETELY shutdown?

are costs to simply maintain it that high?
gpt
The app is not the problem.

The costs come from keeping the infrastructure in place.

If you have internet you are probably paying your ISP each month for the ability to donwload and upload data from the net.

As you can probably imagine, someone hosting lots of videos online also has to pay their ISP each month for the data they up and downloaded to their servers. Since they are using a lot more data than a normal person, they need to pay whole lot more money each month than a normal person.

And that is just for the internet connection to their servers.

They also need to pay for the servers themselves.

Just like you desktop/laptop/tablet/phone whatever cost you money to be, server hardware also cost them money to buy, in fact it costs them a whole lot money to buy because there is a whole lot of it.

And this is not a one time cost. It is a constant cost because if you have enough hardware something is always breaking in some way.

There is also the cost of renting a space to put the servers, the cost of electricity to run them and the cost of colling to keep them from overheating.

All that costs money.

And then there is the fact that even if you stop developing the platform you can't just leave it as is. Every week some new security holes are found in software you use and if you don't want it to be all taken over by hackers you have to constantly patch and upgrade the software you use.

And the worst part is that the IT people who do all that stuff and help keep the whole thing running are not going to do it for free. They will want to get paid. 

Now you don't really need to do everything yourself. You can have others deal with various levels of that whole bag of problems. That is the beauty of the whole 'cloud' thing that everyone kept going on about the last few years. Let someone else deal with the problem of the hardware and how to keep it running. Unfortunately the people who take most of the problem of your hands will want money for it.

There is no way to get out of it without paying someone money and with a service like vine just keeping it running alone can cost a whole lot.