I don't do paid relays because I hate subscriptions. I don't know if I will use it or not. How hard would it be to give users a couple of free posts a week, then make them pay per note? With nwc set up, this could happen automatically, if they give their wallet permission right?

Everyone hates subscriptions, but we have almost only fixed running costs. There's simply no point in offering anything good to someone who will pay us 1¢ sat at a time, when we already offer such cheap subscriptions, for 50¢/month. If you can't afford 50¢/month, then how much would you be pay-as-go? 2¢ per month? That's negative income. Even the 50¢/month is negative income. We have to top up from donations and our own pockets.

@Azz I have it same, I don't like paying for service subscriptions so I run my own relay and blossom server. Yes, in reality it does cost more money, time and nerves than the subscription, but I prefer it that way.

Set your price. If its content I really want to see 50c isntna lot.

But if you are attracting buses who you wouldn't otherwise have, charging 3c a note would note would more than cover the marginal storage costs at no additional fixed cost. .

Content is events and therefore separate from (general) relays. And you would see the content _before_ I could request payment. You would be paying to post your own content, not to see mine.

It costs at least 100x more, over using ours. I also run my own and it's fun, but there are no cost savings.

People who are willing to pay for relays, don't mind paying 50¢-$3/month for one. The prices are negligible. Less than the price of a cup of coffee. People wanting to pay 3¢ to post three times per month are a tiny market of people who actually just don't like paying for a relay and will probably do it once or twice and then stop, leaving you with the fixed costs and the overhead. They're the market segment equivalent of those people who will drive 10 miles out of their way to get 2 packages of butter for 50¢ cheaper and purchase nothing else. They'd rather spend $2k on a new PC or a top-line iPhone and self-host, to be honest. It's simply not a market that makes any sort of economic sense because their aversion to paying isn't about the price. They don't like paying other people for IT services. Full stop. I prefer to just offer them the lower-quality freebie version and not have to bother haggling with them over whether it should be 3¢ or 2.45¢. There are Class A, B, and C customers. Pull out all of the stops for As, offer the Bs a bare-bones el-cheapo version, and let the Cs scrape along with the freebie version. This goes into the classic 7Ps of marketing.

Content creators think it’s absurd to have to pay to post, yet think it’s perfectly normal to have a 30-40% platform cut from their gains. 🤷‍♂️

Math is hard.

Price, pandas, panic, poppadoms, what’s the other 3?

First rule of marketing: Always go full poppadom

BTW, we know that this analysis is accurate because there's a mid-range relay costing 21 sats/month and most Nostriches who complain about subscriptions aren't on it. Their negative attitude is a whole mental state that is completely unaffected by price. They would not be willing to pay 21 sats each time they post. The hurdle is in _any payment of any size at any time_.