This is actually great because not only does it share the hosting load but models occasionally get pulled from sites so they can be exclusive to some AI subscription service.
That's interesting - do you have an example of a model that was pulled off and made subscription-only? I saw this post and was like, "Civitai has this covered," but seems like I'm wrong.
Deliberate was gone for a little while (available in HuggingFace now) and I think I've seen others be taken down too for violating licenses or the author doing shady things to boost stats. Some older models are also really hard to find. Even though they're low quality by current standards they did seem to have a bit more creativity.
Might be misremember on the subscription thing. Maybe it was v1-v2 of some model was free to download and anything newer was API only. Regardless I think authors are free to pull stuff whenever they choose.
I tried to download one and it accused me of being a bot and looped me through a capcha twice in a row and I gave up. *shrug* Otherwise seems like a good idea. Good luck.