Yeah, I’m an Indie, I do self publishing without advertising. I’m spending more than I make.
The problem with putting your stuff online is, the pages that specialize in that and have it all set up and ready to go are mostly fanfiction and romance, so you won’t get a lot of reads there, either.
I guess I could just upload my books on GDrive and put download links on my website. Haven’t thought about that deeply yet. But I do write books, not blog posts or diary entries, and I like to have them in a neat package with proper presentation, in a format ebook reader apps can display painlessly. Nobody wants to read 70-100k word novels on a website ;)