I'll take another look.

Glad to be of service, this is an interesting project. If you create any more issues I might take another look when I have some more spare time.

I think you hit the nail on the head with opportunity cost. The main goal should always be to provide (superior) value to the customer. No customer, no business. If the relay can save bandwidth and make it easier to provide a good Nostr experience then it's a win-win.

I like the application specific relay comment as well, I hadn't really thought about that aspect but that makes sense.

The aggregation side seems to have value based on this and other comments. I wonder though if you end up successful, much like you would be taking revenue from the one-time paid relays, existing and new Nostr clients likewise might use your aggregation relay to provide a good experience for their users (and save costs).

Which means your relay would get less income and ultimately the sub-amount would need to compensate for this. Perhaps a value-for-value system could work with the sub here as well, where clients would be grateful and occasionally donate for using your relay in their app. Providing it's "high-quality" and people want to use it.

Or what do you guys think?

I think this is a really interesting idea. I don't currently know exactly how this would be setup, but I'll think about a solution.

I imagine though that the paid relays would be pissed that you basically take their revenue. i.e. you pay the relays once and then collect subs yourself instead of them potentially getting new users.

But if you offer a superior service (by being more user friendly, by being an aggregator), then maybe. I would guess they would start taking a higher one-time fee then, but might not be sustainable?

Five bucks sounds about right to me, though that might be too much currently considering most one-time admission-fee relays (to my knowledge) charge less than that. Perhaps a slightly lower monthly amount, say 2$-3$, with some value-for-value system setup, not sure exactly how to pull that off though.

You would have to prove you have a great relay and establish yourself first for people to want to freely donate for example, and survive the competition in the meantime.

Arch based distros or some Ubuntu based ones like POP!_OS. In the case of Arch I just like pacman and the Archwiki. Right now I'm actually using Manjaro though as it strikes (for me) a happy medium between freedom and convenience.