This is a brilliant breakdown by Nobody, but it also exposes a huge reality check for our space. Commercially and economically, ads make total sense for Web2 businesses because they print billions to fund global infrastructure. But for users, they are incredibly annoying—and they can only really work on a centralized platform that hoards personal data and uses invasive tracking algorithms to be effective. We want something better. If we take out ads, grants, and VC runway, we are left looking at subscriptions. Now, a paywall or membership can work incredibly well for specialized Bitcoin apps—just look at @Club Orange successfully funding itself and keeping out bots through subscriptions. But when it comes to a broad, open protocol like Nostr, look at an app like @primal. How many everyday users are actually going to pay for a premium social subscription out of pocket? The reality is only a tiny fraction ever will. The revenue has to come from somewhere else! The real game-changer for Nostr won't be forcing everyone into monthly subscriptions. It’s going to be value-added infrastructure and built-in marketplace services. 🛒🔌 Think about the WeChat model: building mini-apps and thriving marketplaces directly into the client. We leave the protocol completely free for regular consumers (they only pay if they want specific premium features), but we nudge the businesses and merchants into premium subscriptions. Give merchants powerful, specific tools like geozapping to drive local foot traffic, or charge small micro-fractions on wallet routing and premium media relays. When we build actual, real-world utility directly into the lightning rails, value flows naturally. The entire ecosystem can fund itself organically, scaling to the moon without ever needing to sell out our privacy! View quoted note →

The thread paints this as pricier than it is. Real nostrcheck.me numbers. 5k users, 250k files, 5M events, 2 TB served, 300-500 concurrent connections, and it costs me around 35 euros a month. With an 83% hit rate the origin barely serves 340 GB and Cloudflare eats the rest for free, so egress isn't the monster everyone assumes. Compute and storage don't strain either. At 50k you'd land around 100-200 euros/month with R2 and a dedicated box. Still pocket change next to any subscription. Best 🫂🫂

Thanks heaps for the input 🐰 How many super users do you estimate to have? I tried to take account for a fair amount of video upload

Just pulled the numbers 😱 The top 1% of uploaders hold 82% of the bytes, way more skewed than I expected! Video alone eats 81% of total storage, and only 2k pubkeys touch it at all. So yeah, It's basically the only thing that moves the needle. Budget per heavy-video account, not per user, and you're fine 🥳 Reminder: nostrcheck.me is not a paid server.

There is truth in that 1/9/90 story it seems. Estimates are already taking this ratio into account but also heavier top uploaders. In the end, all this is just to spark debate on economic models. I tried to do it in a way that incentives content creation and research and development. If it’s free, the user is either at the mercy of the sponsor or is the product being sold. I looked for ways to have money flow into the Nostr ecosystem, in this scenario I took the relays (premium access) and media servers as the honey pot. I think it works better than looking at content as the money maker.