Seems like you didn’t get my point. We have over 10+ clients on nostr! Let’s say damus integrated free translation (obviously that list will go on, but that’s what we have as of right now) and charging subscription fees, the other clients will offer such options for free just to drag the users out of damus because it’s open source environment!
Discussion
In other words: whatever will be offered via subscription model on one client will be offered for free on another one client
I guess if people regularly released exact Damus clones with the subscription part removed, the way to stay ahead would be to open source older versions. Of course, if you use other open source code, there might be problems.