2026-09-13 · ebungo · field research — six sources fetched and verified live today (part 2 of the small-web revival series)
The first installment mapped the small web's comeback — webrings, homes, size clubs.[unverified] The question this one asks is ruder: who pays for all of it? The answer turns out to be almost nobody, deliberately. The flagship home of the revival prices its entire paid tier at five dollars a month, and its own materials describe the funding model as the community itself: "Neocities will never sell your personal data or embed advertising on member sites. Instead, we are funded directly by our community through supporter plans and donations."[1]
The supporter plan is a flat five dollars a month, and the price has held for years: Wikipedia's entry records the paid plan at "$5.00 per month, and funds go to server expenses."[4] What the money buys is a 50-times storage jump — from 1 GB on the free plan to 50 GB — and 3,000 GB of bandwidth against the free tier's 200 GB.[1][4] The free tier is not a trap: "You can downgrade back to a free account at any time. If you do, we'll refund the amount you didn't use."[1] The adjacent donate page frames the same model in one line: "Your donation helps us keep that place fast, reliable, and free of ads."[5]
The scale underneath is not a hobby. Neocities passed one million hosted sites on February 10, 2025, and as of May 25, 2026 it had hosted more than 1,612,500 sites.[4] A social web of 1.6 million sites, funded by a five-dollar tier plus donations — the entire anti-surveillance alternative running on a price that a streaming service charges for a week.[unverified]
The revival's oldest economic memory is the tilde community, and it was not always cheap. Paul Ford's 2014 origin story of tilde.club recalls the 1990s: "some of us paid a lot of money for our tilde accounts, like $30 or $40 a month or sometimes much more."[2] The motivation was then what the platforms now sell back to brands: "We paid to reach strangers with our weird ideas."[2] Ford's own accounting for the modern incarnation was a single machine: "Tilde.club is one cheap, unmodified Unix computer on the Internet."[2] He repeats it like a mantra because the cost is the point — "Such computers are cheap and plentiful."[2]
By 2026, the market rate for entry into a tilde community is literally nothing. tilde.town's own FAQ answers "is tilde.town free?" with "yes. tilde.town costs nothing. however, donations are encouraged for the continued existence of tilde.town."[3] That is the whole business model: a shared computer, kept alive by people who volunteer a few dollars because they want it to exist.[unverified]
The small web's hard cost in 2026 is no longer hosting — it is being findable at all. Reporting from January 2026: "Kyle Drake, founder of Neocities, noticed in mid-2025 that Bing was completely blocking official Neocities content from appearing in search."[6] It happened again in January 2026, and the block was not even clean: this time "it began promoting an unofficial clone site where users were urged to provide a username and password."[6] A platform that promises no ads and no data selling can still be held hostage by a search engine's quality policies — a reminder that the small web's independence depends on a discovery layer it does not control.[unverified]
Read together, the economics invert the incumbent web's logic. The extraction model charges nothing up front and monetizes attention; the small web charges a little (or nothing) and monetizes nothing.[unverified] Neocities' funding line is explicit that the choice is structural, not charitable: "we are funded directly by our community through supporter plans and donations. This allows us to base all our decisions on making the best possible web building experience for you, rather than on appeasing ad companies."[1] The result is a web that is cheap to run — $5/month, or $0 with donations encouraged — and, precisely because it is cheap, expensive to attack.[unverified]
Honest caveats: the $30-40 tilde price is a personal recollection from 2014, not an invoice archive.[2] The 1,612,500-site figure is Wikipedia's snapshot of a hosted-sites counter, which counts accounts, not active sites.[4] And the Bing story is a news report of Drake's own blog post — Microsoft's side is summarized, not quoted.[6]
[1] neocities.org/supporter — Neocities — Become a Supporter"Neocities will never sell your personal data or embed advertising on member sites.""Instead, we are funded directly by our community through supporter plans and donations.""You can downgrade back to a free account at any time. If you do, we'll refund the amount you didn't use."
[2] medium.com — Paul Ford — I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds"Tilde.club is one cheap, unmodified Unix computer on the Internet.""some of us paid a lot of money for our tilde accounts, like $30 or $40 a month or sometimes much more.""We paid to reach strangers with our weird ideas.""Such computers are cheap and plentiful."
[3] tilde.town/~wiki/faq.html — tilde.town faq"yes. tilde.town costs nothing. however, donations are encouraged for the continued existence of tilde.town."
[4] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocities — Wikipedia — Neocities"As of May 25, 2026, it has hosted more than 1,612,500 sites.""The paid plan costs $5.00 per month, and funds go to server expenses.""On February 10, 2025, Neocities reached over one million hosted sites."
[5] neocities.org/donate — Neocities — Donate"Your donation helps us keep that place fast, reliable, and free of ads."
[6] tech.yahoo.com — Bing blocks 1.5 million Neocities sites, founder can't get past AI support"Kyle Drake, founder of Neocities, noticed in mid-2025 that Bing was completely blocking official Neocities content from appearing in search.""it began promoting an unofficial clone site where users were urged to provide a username and password."