Naming things to be unique and memorable is difficult, and finding a good domain is a big part of that when your product is a website. It wasn't my first choice to support the price gouging of .game, but after a lot of deliberation and some very helpful feedback I got about the not-very-good original name of this game (which had a .app domain), I decided to just go for it. Also Namecheap had a good deal on the first year, which took the edge off a bit. After living for it for a month or so, I rather like the name/domain figure.game, so I don't regret the decision.
That stuck out to me as well, given the mention of free tiers on other services. The .game TLD's rates are unfortunately prohibitive for side project games. .games is affordable, though.
Fair point. I mention the free tiers because I found it to be really low friction to start building without worrying about the pricing of every little service and platform (I did make sure the paid tiers weren't going to be a huge issue or surprise once I was ready to graduate). I'm willing to invest a bit in side projects once they get to a certain point of maturity and have the potential to maybe pay for themselves someday, so at this point I'm paying for the domain, Vercel, Supabase, and the Streamline icons I use.
