"Custom" means expensive

Whenever you build sufficiently complex software, you have to decide whether to leverage existing solutions or build your own. 99 times out of 100, building your own should be avoided. It's way too expensive (time, developers, maintenance, etc). You want to focus on building the 10% of your app that's actually different from everything else out there, and just pick the quickest and easiest option for things that don't differentiate your product.

But certain existing options are highly configurable. This is great for meeting your exact needs, but in my experience, there's almost always a specific feature or custom setting that no one else is using. That means the project will likely stop supporting it at some point. You'll have to increase your spend to either support it yourself or migrate to a different solution. Neither option is great.

So how does this tie into blockchain?

If you're building a dApp, and you want to make it free-to-use, there aren't a lot of good options.

You could run your own blockchain. (Expensive, and no ecosystem with traction to support you)

You could launch a configurable subnet using Avax or a similar competitor. (Good ecosystem, but high up front and maintenance costs)

You could purchase a lot of gas tokens on an existing network that supports account abstraction. (Reasonable option at first for many chains, but if your dApp becomes popular, your costs can rise rapidly)

You could rely on grants. (Good place to start, but has the same problem as the previous option in the long term)

You could buy a gasless resource token like Koin or a similar competitor. (Reasonable up front capital expense that you can expect to retain its value, pending market volatility)

You could use Koinos pro or a similar service that rents out its gasless resources. (Pricing is going to be more consistent, no up front cost)

In reality, you'll need to take a combination of approaches, but gasless chains offer an attractive economic model for free to use dApps for significantly less work.

-Luke

P.S. I've gotten a few questions about the state of BurnKoin. The pool is operating well for long term profit maximization as intended. The design allows botting which has made Koin withdrawals difficult recently. If you want to stay invested in VHP, BurnKoin is still a great option for you. We're working on plans for a v2 that will alleviate some of the UX issues resulting from bot activity.