Would you pay a subscription for a high-quality Nostr relay? \ stacker news ~nostr

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Would you pay a subscription for a high-quality Nostr relay?

1516 sats \ 35 comments \ @brynrussell 23 Feb 2023 nostr

There are already several Nostr relays that require a one-time admission fee to use them. I am not convinced this is a winning payment model.

The cost of (in the case of a high-quality relay) maintenance, updating spam-filters, and generally keeping the relay always up and running will increase with more users. Especially considering things will go wrong and there will be some customer service involved as well. Guaranteed.

If what I've said seems correct to you, would you be willing to pay a recurring fee (in sats) to be able to use such a high-quality relay? Why or why not?

Bonus sats if you come up with a non-standard model that might work better.

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308 sats \ 0 replies \ @gandlaf21 24 Feb 2023

pay per interaction:

Post a note: 1satoshi Pull a note: 0.001 Satoshi

39 sats \ 1 reply \ @fedelang 23 Feb 2023

I would pay a subscription(s) fee for global relay network(s).

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @kr 23 Feb 2023

how much would you be willing to pay?

131 sats \ 3 replies \ @TonyGiorgio 23 Feb 2023

What about paying for a relay that bundles up subscriptions to other relays and aggregates events to and from all of them for you, helping you save on bandwidth and repeated downloading of duplicate events?

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @benthecarman 24 Feb 2023

And you can proxy nip5 verification and image downloading through?

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @brynrussell OP 24 Feb 2023

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?

20 sats \ 0 replies \ @jeffg 24 Feb 2023

You've basically just described every web2 business model. It's so hard not to centralize and aggregate on the web.

Not a knock, I think it's just super hard to see around the corner at what novel business model is going to come out of Nostr.

70 sats \ 0 replies \ @kristapsk 23 Feb 2023

Today I paid 4500 sats for https://relay.orangepill.dev as a test, added as another relay. Damus seems to be working better.

51 sats \ 1 reply \ @kr 23 Feb 2023

curious to know people’s thoughts as well.

…and if you say yes, how much would you be willing to pay?

personally, i’d probably pay $5/month in sats for a great nostr user experience.

361 sats \ 0 replies \ @brynrussell OP 23 Feb 2023

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.

20 sats \ 0 replies \ @037447d9ca 23 Feb 2023

1 sat per post delivered

120 sats \ 1 reply \ @BitcoinMaxiNewsdotCom 24 Feb 2023

I would pay $15-$25 a month if I would be guaranteed to reach tons of Bitcoiners...🙂

110 sats \ 0 replies \ @021530d0b5 24 Feb 2023

I'd pay the same but would like to spread that among the clients and relays I use. Paying for what I use is a priority.

We've got decades of experience with free rider internet and we can clearly see where that leads us. Value4Value

50 sats \ 2 replies \ @TheBTCManual 24 Feb 2023

I think it depends on access and scale, if you're a massive account with thousands of followers, maybe even millions one day, then yes a paid subscription relay that can help aggregate too would make sense and be worth it to give that account a smoother experience

I also think that subs would make sense in a world where there are application specific relays, lets say social relays, gaming relays and I don't know whatever niche content requires custom events then yeah

I also think subscription relays make sense if you can offer the user hosting for files, lets say YouTubers or something

Opportunity costs

I think that the subscription relay's USP should appeal to cost saving, so lets say you're on all these relays pushing you redundant information how much of that eats into your bandwidth so if you're a mobile user, it could be costly to nostr from your phone where this relay can bring down the cost

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @brynrussell OP 24 Feb 2023

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?

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheBTCManual 24 Feb 2023

I guess we will see cannibalisation of income from relays where there is too much overlap, but I don't see this as a bad thing, I see that as a sign that this market is serviced and you move on to the underserviced market, the smaller relays will always be chasing the niche interests

Bigger HPR (High-performance Relays) will compete with larger categories, if we only take social media IE Twitter/Reddit style posting, I think there's a place for everyone, small relays would be servicing more obscure categories like collecting antiques or some random thing, (we still have so many of these forums up today)

Then HPRs could focus on broader categories of appeal like Gaming, Movies, Books, stuff where a lot of people overlap, have an interest, and create content

I think client HPRs would source from other HPRs and smaller relays looking for content that gets the most engagement, and feed it up to their relay and client, because their incentive isn't to house content but to serve content that brings in the most users and increases time on site

As for payment, I think yes some HPRs would take up a bunch of the subs fees, but I wonder couldn't they request indexing from other relays for popular content and then pay them for doing that discovery, so the ones getting the most income from subs still feed relays who do the work sourcing content

40 sats \ 0 replies \ @21millions 24 Feb 2023

I think nostr will benefit greatly by using the stacker news model of "pay-to-do", you don's suscribe to a server but leverage the micro tx hability of LN to pay per note, pay per reaction.

I think that the Zapp will kill the "like" buttom, so having it now could be an example of skeumorphism.

In a more sophisticated approach we might want to think about where a relay operator expends the most and monetize in the bases of that. Is it bandwith? is ti storage? a combination of both?

30 sats \ 0 replies \ @Coinosphere 24 Feb 2023

I think the best fee schedule is pay-per-use. 1 sat fee paid to the relay each use. (Of course when 1 sat = 1 USD that could be lowered)

The problem with "paid subscription" over lightning is that bitcoin is a push system, not a pull system like traditional banking. There's no way for others to pull from your account, you have to voluntarily push it out and subscriptions are basically a way to make future work for yourself each month.

But pay-per use wouldn't be extra work, and you wouldn't be paying for usage when you're not taking advantage of it.

20 sats \ 0 replies \ @takaponka 23 Feb 2023

server maintenance is good argument, 5000 sats a month

20 sats \ 0 replies \ @gfy 23 Feb 2023

No I already have enough monthly subsriptions to everything else in life as it is. I would be willing to pay more for the initial Nostr relay onboard though.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @arcanox 24 Feb 2023

Imagine 2035 and looking back on that 1000$ relay you paid for that you no longer use because it's been abandoned and infested by bots lol

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @bshell 24 Feb 2023

yes.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @fred 24 Feb 2023

As long as we pay in sats

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @m4 24 Feb 2023

You need just one relay your own

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford 24 Feb 2023

Yep

10 sats \ 3 replies \ @janetyellen 24 Feb 2023

I would not use nostr even if somebody paid me to use it!

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Kaffi 24 Feb 2023

Want to elaborate? What are you cons to nostr

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @go 24 Feb 2023

Janet "Karen" Yellen, y'all IN THE HOUSE

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Coinosphere 24 Feb 2023

Have fun staying uniformed!

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Jorj_X_McKie 24 Feb 2023

Yesh

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @beorange 23 Feb 2023

The cost of (in the case of a high-quality relay) maintenance, updating spam-filters, and generally keeping the relay always up and running will increase with more users.

I need a more detailed and concrete explanation of what you mean by "high quality".

Also, as it has already been said in other comments a better system would be to charge X sats per submission.