Tier 1 cost-affordability is deceptive — a single surfacing event exceeds a century of repository fees

Hosted Tier 1 storage looks cheap on the annual line item. LYRASIS DSpaceDirect runs $4,000-$9,000/year, Digital Commons $10,000-$12,000/year (E-0078), and raw cloud archival storage costs $12-$48 per TB-year (E-0079). These are routine departmental software-budget magnitudes; the purchase of Tier 1 service is not what limits adoption.

What the annual fee does not capture is the liability the architecture leaves open. §3 documents that providers fail routinely and for many different reasons — bankruptcy, acquisition, defunding, jurisdictional change, internal reorganization, terms-of-service revision. §5 quantifies what one surfacing event costs: an audit, a False Claims Act action, or a retraction cascade can exceed a century of repository fees on a single dataset. The economics of Tier 1 are favorable only until the liability is realized.

The 1:10:100 cost heuristic (M-0004) frames the asymmetry: prevention at the source is the $1 column, but Tier 1's $1 buys storage without the resilience properties that prevent the $10 and $100 columns from materializing. The Tier 1 line item underprices the architecture's exposure to the §3 failure modes by orders of magnitude.

This is the cost-side correlate of C-0011 (Tier 1 is one organizational decision away from Tier 0). C-0011 names the architectural fragility; C-0050 names the cost-vs-liability mismatch the fragility produces. Together with C-0027 (the §5.6 billion-dollar-tail-vs-rounding-error synthesis), C-0050 establishes that Tier 1 is not a lower-cost alternative to Tier 3 — it is a lower-up-front-cost option that carries the §5 liability that Tier 3 closes structurally.