It’s volatile based on both the ETH price and the TX gas price. My calculation was based on ~200 gwei which became the norm these days. The absolute minimum I’ve paid was ~$150-200 for a full cycle (so half of what I mentioned in the thread). But that’s because I’m camping for low gas prices with alarms set on 3 different tools to email me.
This is bad, nonetheless.
When you’re allocating towards subgraphs you need to take into consideration the ratio of Signal-to-Stake on that subgraph in order to be optimal. So in a perfect world, the stake that you have to allocate would have to be proportional to the Subgraph Signal.
BUT, there are inefficiencies, and this is something that I mentioned in the very last note of the thread, I called it Stake-to-Signal ratio, and it’s a market inefficiency that will eventually be covered by a healthy market. Just like we have the Indexers offering high APY by giving their own rewards away, they eventually get delegations and things get balanced out.
Plus, there’s the other side of the story. What if you allocate towards a set of subgraphs while it was efficient for you to do it, and then someone immediately comes in with a huge allocation and throws you into the inefficient area, you’d have to deallocate, and balance your stake again. Doing it less than every 28 days (max allo lifetime) will be very costly in terms of gas, and we go back to the 1st point you mentioned, that we need to move to L2 asap.
Allowing indexers to move freely inside the protocol without having to have worries about paying tens of thousands of dollars for allocations will make the protocol economy very robust imo, and leads towards a more healthy market. 