Nostr.land does 5k sats/mo for an aggregator and 5 other types of relays in one.
One time fees for relays as done by some big relays are ponzi schemes.
New users subsidize the cost required to provide services to older users, as server costs are recurring, but payments are not.
Stupid model, but that works almost everywhere. You're kind of describing support departments. The are entirely funded off added cost to the purchase price of the product, but more accurately, customers who paid for the product and didn't use support paid for other people to use support.
The same goes for shipping in a slightly different context. We made a model of weighted averages where essentially a "tax" was added to the median products to subsidize the shipping cost on the larger products. So the more frequent purchases made up the difference for the more infrequent (heavier/long distance) purchases.
obvi this happens everywhere, I just wanted to break down that this is not new and companies everywhere do something similar because selling anything almost anywhere is "unsustainable" in many ways.
Yeah but in this case, it’s a one time fee for a recurring expense. And the amount of money that comes in has to keep increasing over time semi-exponentially to be sustainable, or the costs need to be cut (you get worse service).
This is worse than cross subsidization which is doable if managed right.
Which I see that you recognize here. This model works _realy_ well to make offering products sustainable. Distribution is the right word I suppose.
Event volume is also disconnected from real load. It just means you push out high-event-volume customers that may actually cost the same (less active time per day/data fetched)
So it just makes the problem worse than it would have been with an “accurate” usage model.
But yes, the pricing is designed with the “average customer” as the target on Nostr.land.
There is no good usage metric and users shouldn’t have to worry about quotas unless you are in the 99.9%p.
> Yeah but in this case, it’s a one time fee for a recurring expense
Yeah it hides the actual cost of offering a service. Appealing to user's ideals, which in some cases is useful.
As someone who prefers one-time costs over reoccurring costs, I also understand that unless you can accurately bill me, its not a true model. While it's nice to save money when purchasing bulk, I prefer up-front costs for a sense of "freedom" and "completeness". I still think it's possible to sell accurately priced products with longer time frames.
The same distribution still occurs right, if I pay you up front, you have access to more capital, which can be more valuable compared to minimum short term payments. Therefore a tax is added to short term payment plans and/or a discount applied to initial payments/contracts.
A one time price in this case is one layer of abstraction too far.
It is unpredictable how long a lifetime user will stay, while relay costs are easily translateable to a “average cost per user per month” with little variance.
In software, where the recurring cost is maintenance (and can be bound to a few years per edition), it is much easier to model one time edition fees (which is a good model!)
But in “cloud” the recurring costs are not time-bound and there is no product without recurring costs.
Accurate and fair. I would agree lifetime is too far out. At least on the hardware side of things, it generally apears to be within about the 60-month lease window where prices are somewhat stable. When new hardware is released from Nvidia, or Dell, or HP, give it about 1-2 years for machines to ship, then cost of new products and derivative products go up, and old harware sells of in proportion to new hardware prices.
Meaning new hardware has steadily increased in MSRP, and older hardware prices fall in proportion. So machines appear to be losing their value "slower".
Renting at least gives you the option to upgrade to newer hardware without much cost change, at an overall premium in prices. But it also means you do not need someone in the DC to do physical work.
Anything more than a few years also reduces your flexibility, and increases the "lag" between cost changes if any happen => you passing them on => you getting paid
