Administration and development costs, and economies of scale (or rather the inverse)
Also something big is coming that I am not going to spoil yet, that will make you think the current price is a steal :)
Discussion
You forgot that there exists other tiers like the yearly ones as well.
Also the discounted price is $75/3 years. For now :)
Looking forward to it. I’m all for sustainable, honest business models.
What usage are you assuming on that account? Could it make sense to have different tiers in terms of how much people use it? After all they’re not paying for “an account” but rather just for traffic, right?
Or is it that the people posting to the server are also subsidizing everyone reading from the server for free?
The cost of payment includes the data being served.
Fair use applies. So if you spam the relay with garbage, or use significantly more (and by that I mean very significantly) resources than everyone else, you might be asked to leave
Otherwise the cost per user is actually not variable too much.
Serving content to lurkers is by far the bulk of the bandwidth, right? So the people paying to post are subsidizing the lurkers.
This becomes especially problematic if you have a celebrity like nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m paying to post on your relay, right? You could charge Jack more to post, but then he has to recoup his own costs on that.
So should the “tiers” be based more on popularity of the user rather than how much they post?
The only other option is to charge lurkers for lurking to pay for the much greater content serving bandwidth
From my testing the costs are not significantly different between say an influencer and an average user.
Not that it makes a dent when you have hundreds of users.
So each user gets billed how much their content costs to serve on average
