People used to make shitty websites with good content but now they need to make good, professional looking websites for people to even look at them to decide on the whether the content was good.
This takes time and if you’re doing it for free then you’re choosing to do extra work on top of your day job.
As others have said, there are costs to hosting a website other than the time that you’re expecting people to give for free.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be ‘work’, people used to make websites out of passion. Now everyone wants to monetize everything.
It is always work even if it’s a passion project.
People used to make shitty websites with good content but now they need to make good, professional looking websites for people to even look at them to decide on the whether the content was good.
This takes time and if you’re doing it for free then you’re choosing to do extra work on top of your day job.
As others have said, there are costs to hosting a website other than the time that you’re expecting people to give for free.