Nostr Web Client

Yes I was thinking this is going to take a lot of effort but some Force is making it work reliably and I haven't spent much energy! I consider it money really well spent 😎 In return I get all the good vibes of Nostr 😆 But if my free relay operation is killing the relay economy by being so cheap, I may start charging for it for the sake of establishing an economy for relay ops to become sustainable.

pam 2y ago

May the force be with you always 💜

I think we need an open field to encourage more users to join Nostr ie free relays + no Bitcoin pre-requisite. We need more users if we want relay economy to work (and eventually they will use Bitcoin for zaps).

What would an avg cost of managing per relay per month be like ? A rough estimate based on no of user + infrastructures + utility + average time (good + bad days).

Say average cost is $2k USD , abt 7.3M sats. If you charge a one time fee of 5k sats, you need 1,500 new users per month just to break even.

Number might seem high now but social media going viral can have user growth of 150% YoY. Twitter has >300M users. I think the user adoption is going to be crucial next few months.

I also think relay branding helps. Say Nos already has a wide user base and eventually you want to set up paid relays, for example :

- Nos VIP

- Nos exclusive

- interest-based ,

- private relays with celebrities,

- Personalised relay rental services? 🤷‍♀️

When you have wide user who love your brand, it’s gonna be easier present them these options and convert them to charging users later on be it monthly, annually, one time fee etc

I think relay economics can go wild, and definitely profitable but need to strategise and get the users in first. And relay branding and marketing.

I also think it would really help if relay devs can make it simple and no brainer, and even make users feel special when it comes to needing to select relays. So that instead of users feeling like it’s an extra step or a stumbling block, they get excited abt it.

Relay economics will work as users grow 🫂

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Discussion

someone 2y ago

Thank you for sending Force towards my way 💜🫂

Yes, I think with more content and initiatives like #growNostr Nostr will be attracting more users. There should be completely free relays for newcomers and majority of users. We have to do better than the existing alternatives in order for people to move. If all relays charge, then "critical mass" may never come. So a free to use but "premium for more or faster use" model could work.

In the future majority of the cost would be programming costs, the scripts to check spams and scripts to handle premium accounts. That could reach 1000 USD/mo. Lets say I charge 10 USD / month, I should find 100 users who would like to pay. However if a relay op wants to do less features he could charge less and offer less and do small amount of coding. I think "One time fee" model is good for spam but not very feasible in the long term. I would go for yearly or even 3 year subscriptions.

pam 2y ago

Agreed on all and thanks for sharing! Always learning something new from you! The current one time fees for paid relays is also low, and while it enables global market penetration - i think it’s a user behaviour thing and owning Bitcoin as pre-requisite that might be a barrier to entry. Once we get them on board, I have no doubt people will pay for the premium relays based on their usage and preference.