Is there a way to find out a little more about these relays before paying for them?
If you're new to Nostr, paid relays may seem a bit confusing. You just need to do a little bit of up front work.
You need a Bitcoin Lightning wallet. Lightning is a fast, cheap and scalable solution for Bitcoin that makes paying for goods and services extremely easy. Wallet of Satoshi is probably one of the easiest options available. You can also use others too, such as Alby, ZBD or Muun.
You can find a list of all known paid relays at https://relay.exchange. While this website lists plenty of relays and their fees, what it doesn't tell you is their popularity or location. You can ask your followers or the people that you're following which paid relays that they're using or you can view their profile (pending client support) and view the relays that they're using.
Once you know which relays that you're going to try out or use, you'll want to visit their website, pay the admission fee, and add their relay address to your profile. Be sure to enable both read and write capabilities and then save or post the changes. That's it.
These are the paid relays that I'm using and have been using over the past month.
wss://eden.nostr.land
wss://puravida.nostr.land
wss://atlas.nostr.land
wss://relay.orangepill.dev
wss://nostr.milou.lol
wss://nostr.wine
Discussion
We don't have a great solution for this, sadly. You can see the relay operator's npub on that website that I linked and start following them, see what they post, ask them about their relay, etc. Honestly, the best method for finding out what relays to use at this point falls into the Web-of-Trust method. What relays are people using that you trust?
I don’t think you should have to pay for relays