I started BitChute in 2017. I did not know then what it would cost.

I knew what I wanted to build. A place where creators owned what they made. Where the rules were clear before you signed up and applied the same way to everyone after. Where your audience was yours because you built it, not because an algorithm decided this week to show them your work.

That was not a complicated idea. It turned out to be an expensive one.

We were deplatformed. Not once. The infrastructure most people assume is available to any legitimate business, payment processors, banking, app stores, hosting, is available conditionally.

The condition is compliance. Not legal compliance. Political compliance. Compliance with whatever the dominant platforms and the institutions that serve them decide is acceptable.

We lost payment processors. We operated without a bank account. Running a technology platform without a bank account means every normal operation becomes a problem to solve from scratch. The energy that should go into building goes into surviving.

You learn quickly who is committed to what they say they believe.

Most people are not. Not out of malice. There is a price at which most people will find a reason to walk away. A reason that sounds principled. A reason they can explain to themselves.

I did not walk away.

What we are building became clearer the longer we held on.

This is not a platform where users generate content that the platform monetizes. It is a stakeholder community. People who create here, watch here, and build here are not users. They are stakeholders with unalienable rights.

The right to know the rules before they build. The right to have those rules applied equally. The right to due process before anything they have built is touched. The right to their audience, earned through their own labor, not held on loan from an algorithm.

These are not features. They are commitments. They are why we paid what we paid, and why we are still here.

The spirit of 1776 was not complicated. It was the refusal to accept unaccountable power over your life and your labor. It was the insistence that rights are not granted by institutions and cannot be revoked by them.

That spirit did not disappear. It survives where people are willing to bear the cost of it.

It survives here.

In April 2026 you will see what nine years of that looks like.

It is built differently. Because it had to be.

Ray Vahey Founder, BitChute