I am going to mint a collection of 10,000 NFTs. However, I've become very concerned over the gas costs associated with such an endeavor. I was wondering if someone could help me understand the following:
When I created an account on OpenSea there was a one time gas fee. After that I can mint as many NFTs and create as many collections as I want all for free. How is this possible?
If I programmatically mint NFTs on the mainnet for example by following this tutorial, I must pay the gas price when I deploy the contract and for each NFT I mint right? Seems like it will cost a fortune to mint 10,000 if I have to pay a substantial gas price for each mint.
I've looked at Cargo which is supposed to be designed for batch minting but it seems like there is actually a lot of hidden costs.
Is there an inexpensive solution (<US$500) for me to deploy 10,000 NFTs other than uploading them one by one manually onto OpenSea?