I self host them on domains I own.

I’ve been trying to get a short domain to do exactly that, do you know any good brokers?

They should cover R&D costs too, not just the cost of manufacture and materials.

Having all pins present, I wouldn’t be surprised if the drive still gets detected while bending a SATA cable back juuuuuust right so its connector makes contact with the pins.

Even if you could, probably not a single HTTPS site would work due to some technicalities with deprecated web encryption technologies or expired SSL certificates.