Inevitably someone will end up paying for Tangled. Their architecture demands an infrastructure piece that actually hosts the forges and PDSs through BlueSky won't always be free. They're also non-trivial to run.
A relay is also fairly trivial to set up and can be orchestrated via docker I believe. You can run them on a raspberry pi as long as you have a half decent internet connection.
The tangled appview runs on a single machine w/ like 4 cores and a few gigs of ram.
You can run a knot (git host for tangled) on pretty much any hardware.
And a spindle (CI runner for tangled) on anything that meets the requirements for your CI ops.
It's multiple moving parts which increases complexity but IIRC they also all have nix flake support as well so orchestrating all of the moving parts together via nix is increasingly trivial.
The infrastructure to host the forges is still a problem yes, but PDSes are VERY trivial to run, they’re just a Node.js app and they have a Compose file to make running it a quick shell script to run. And they will always be free, Bluesky is well aware that making access to the platform a paid thing would kill the project outright, and even then the code is open source and in the process of being written up as an RFC, so… please fact check your comments before posting :)
It's also factual to say that Tangled is substantially different from BlueSky. Their AppView is stateful, they synchronize via NATS, and PDSs are linked beyond that. Again, substantially more complex than your average atproto architecture.