<p>Digital whistleblowing platforms are a vital means of protecting society by exposing serious wrongdoing. Yet, the techno-solutionist narrative that promotes these digital tools often overlooks the transformed nature of the risks involved. This article addresses a critical gap in understanding the tangible, material impacts of digital whistleblowing, particularly the financial costs of digital self-defense. We present findings from a novel empirical study analyzing documented cases of digital whistleblowers, demonstrating how they face algorithmic retaliation and lose both the financial and temporal resources necessary to redevelop their livelihoods post-disclosure. Our analysis reveals significant hybrid costs involving cybersecurity, legal, and health expenditures. Based on these insights, we make two key contributions. First, we introduce a new conceptual framing of digital post-disclosure experiences through a feminist lens, emphasizing the hybrid vulnerability—both physical and digital—of whistleblowers and their networks. Second, we reposition the activity following disclosure as a form of immaterial and affective labour, defending against algorithmic precarity, which demands new skills and expenses while being carried out with depleted income. Ultimately, we show that whistleblowers’ survival depends on institutional digital supports or, in their absence, on fragile personal and activist networks. By reconceptualizing digital whistleblowing as materially costly, technologically mediated, and collectively borne, we invert the typical ethical formulation: instead of a duty to report using digital tools, we argue for a responsibility to protect whistleblowers from the digital vulnerability to which these systems expose them.</p>