I don’t think even paid subscriptions are going to cover the costs of development on Damus.
We may get half of a percent of users to pay monthly, but then you have to consider all of the clients trying to stay afloat, file hosting services and relays.
Unless the network scales significantly I don’t see how subscriptions would be viable.
What am I overlooking?
I agree that subscriptions wouldn’t cover the costs involved, but they’re a good way for people who aren’t able to assist in building Nostr to contribute.
For example, I try to help out with product or feature ideas, translations for Snort and whatnot but from a coding perspective I am quite useless. So subscriptions to support my favourite #Nostr clients is a great avenue to be able to keep assisting and helping out.
No argument there.
I think you are overlooking the gossip model, where people can self-host small personal relays on a tiny VPS or a raspberry pi in their closet, and all these people can follow each other and nobody needs to moderate content (but they do need to filter incoming spam, just like with email). Relays don't need to be costly services. Certainly people who aren't comfortable hosting their own relay will sign up for a service, and such services can monetize, just as email providers do today. Client development costs are limited over time; we have quite functional clients already.
That cannot scale.
The only aspect of it that doesn't scale well is if you want to follow 5000 people from your phone and need to connect to nearly 5000 relays. But that situation can be supported if a personal relay did the aggregation for your client. Bittorrent clients can regularly handle 10000 connections at a time. And even if that were a problem, round robin scanning could be used instead of holding the connections open.
It scales.
We don't have what we need yet, though. We need a personal relay with the right ruleset (two attempts have been made at this, but neither quite got there) and the ability to operate it as a headless client (eventually).
Could you please create a video on self-hosting a small personal relay using a raspberry pi with gossip? Or if you have a reference on how to do it, we would appreciate it if you could share it with us.
So, are you saying that Damus will inevitably fall?
Was referring to nostr, sorry. No not necessarily.
ssb still works 10 years later and don’t think anyone’s made a dime. If we believe this is a better solution and it truly is it will scale to support itself and possibly beyond anyone’s wildest imaginations… although rarely the earliest players are the big winners.
I've long thought that the one feasable way to monetize *anything on the internet that could replace the yucky advertising model is facilitating monetary transactions between users and collecting fees.
Look at how many fees credit card providers and payment providers collect. We are removing them from the equation and can step in to use these fees for the good of the network.
That's why nostr will succeed is that it has traction integrating p2p payments and is moving in the right direction with splits etc.
The service operators and developers will have to position themselves in the network so they can collect fees for operation expenses on each transaction. It will not be nearly as lucrative as advertising and that's why we should attempt to run extremely efficiently to ensure that the services can pay for themselves while the snowball grows.
That's how I think it will work anyway.. 🤙
It will. It’s just needs strategy and growth.
1. Have at least 1 year of support fund.
2. Spend the first few months cleaning up basics and building loyal users.
3. For subscription model I assumed 30% user conversion, and 20% for in-app
4. Plan your marketing strategies to increase user usage
5. Collab with tool devs to reduce resources and expand market.
6. Have user growth target. 1.5x per month? Global hype slowly picking up.
7. Have fix paid resources when you have sustainable income likely in Y2. For now we need to expand gigs and bounties for support devs . And invite others who are willing got contribute for free.
I’ve done a super brief financial projection and it can net profit within a year. But clients have to plan their strategy and goals.
Clients are bound to make many mistake and that’s ok. We are all here as their safety nets
And also, tech people don’t start off as business people. So if they are not sure what to do, that’s normal. Nobody really knows what to do. Everyone is basing on knowledge, experience and second guesses. And we can talk it through - like what we are doing rn
30%?! No way lol. Maybe if the most loyal users but not daily active users - maybe 1% generously speaking.
It depends - some rule of thumb say 2-5%, some say 50% . I think we’ve had this conversation before. But reality is we are gonna be debating on a completely superficial number.
What influences the % though is the users and the stage we are at - we are not at mainstream market yet where most users are not gonna gonna care - we are at early adopter phase where people are concerned. There’s also stats on daily uses vs signups with profile and these are a bit more hardcore Ppl here who are passionate abt Nostr and want to support its growth.
Maybe as user amount increased then we will see a lower churn but revenue will keep up
I’ll pray for 30%. With social I expect no more than 2% but who knows, with early adopter crowd might actually go 10+
Probably. Or less, or more. We don't know.
At 10% subscription and 20% MoM growth - break even is in Feb 2024
At 1% subscription and 20% MoM, net profit positive at Dec 2024.
At 10% subscription and 10% MoM growth - break even is in Oct 2024
But highly dependent on No of user growth MoM - so the goal would be to grow the user base - and this has to be done through various tools, and use cases
I did a simple sheet for you to play around with the numbers here. Infrastructure cost is complete assumption, dev's min wage based on damus Will. No of users is from one of the clients
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mRPqYvTJ1ckBiXHM9LEQIXz31H2uFw5vw2R48yf1F1s/edit?usp=sharing
Do you not think that 1,000 subscribers at $5/month is very possible for a client app - as an example?
That certainly should cover server costs, and be at least a supplementary income.
If you 10X that to 10,000 subscribers, that’s 50,000/month. I can’t see how at least some Nostr services can’t achieve that.
Keep in mind the $5 is just an average price/user. Maybe premium $15/month users make up 50% of revenue. Business may pay even more.
For sure, if you have many full time staff, pay for OS contributions yourself (instead of community fund), and don’t grow as your subscriptions and Nostr community grows, you’ll have a hard time.
As a side note, if Nostr has let’s say 10 great client apps for social. If each app has an even share, that’s only 100,000 total paying customers for the $50,000/month per client app revenue. If Nostr can’t attract let’s say 10% paying customers with 1 million total users - it will stay niche and likely die off slowly or centralise anyway.
Unless I’m tired and my numbers are bogus.. seems achievable within next two 10X growth cycles to 100X from today. I’ve already been through four Nostr 10X growth cycles.
Do you not think that 1,000 subscribers at $5/month is very possible for a client app - as an example?
That certainly should cover server costs, and be at least a supplementary income.
If you 10X that to 10,000 subscribers, that’s 50,000/month. I can’t see how at least some Nostr services can’t achieve that.
Keep in mind the $5 is just an average price/user. Maybe premium $15/month users make up 50% of revenue. Business may pay even more.
For sure, if you have many full time staff, pay for OS contributions yourself (instead of community fund), and don’t grow as your subscriptions and Nostr community grows, you’ll have a hard time.
As a side note, if Nostr has let’s say 10 great client apps for social. If each app has an even share, that’s only 100,000 total paying customers for the $50,000/month per client app revenue. If Nostr can’t attract let’s say 10% paying customers with 1 million total users - it will stay niche and likely die off slowly or centralise anyway.
Unless I’m tired and my numbers are bogus.. seems achievable within next two 10X growth cycles to 100X from today. I’ve already been through four Nostr 10X growth cycles.
Do you not think that 1,000 subscribers at $5/month is very possible for a client app - as an example?
That certainly should cover server costs, and be at least a supplementary income.
If you 10X that to 10,000 subscribers, that’s 50,000/month. I can’t see how at least some Nostr services can’t achieve that.
Keep in mind the $5 is just an average price/user. Maybe premium $15/month users make up 50% of revenue. Business may pay even more.
For sure, if you have many full time staff, pay for OS contributions yourself (instead of community fund), and don’t grow as your subscriptions and Nostr community grows, you’ll have a hard time.
As a side note, if Nostr has let’s say 10 great client apps for social. If each app has an even share, that’s only 100,000 total paying customers for the $50,000/month per client app revenue. If Nostr can’t attract let’s say 10% paying customers with 1 million total users - it will stay niche and likely die off slowly or centralise anyway.
Unless I’m tired and my numbers are bogus.. seems achievable within next two 10X growth cycles to 100X from today. I’ve already been through four Nostr 10X growth cycles.
Do you not think that 1,000 subscribers at $5/month is very possible for a client app - as an example?
That certainly should cover server costs, and be at least a supplementary income.
If you 10X that to 10,000 subscribers, that’s 50,000/month. I can’t see how at least some Nostr services can’t achieve that.
Keep in mind the $5 is just an average price/user. Maybe premium $15/month users make up 50% of revenue. Business may pay even more.
For sure, if you have many full time staff, pay for OS contributions yourself (instead of community fund), and don’t grow as your subscriptions and Nostr community grows, you’ll have a hard time.
As a side note, if Nostr has let’s say 10 great client apps for social. If each app has an even share, that’s only 100,000 total paying customers for the $50,000/month per client app revenue. If Nostr can’t attract let’s say 10% paying customers with 1 million total users - it will stay niche and likely die off slowly or centralise anyway.
Unless I’m tired and my numbers are bogus.. seems achievable within next two 10X growth cycles to 100X from today. I’ve already been through four Nostr 10X growth cycles.
That’s how much systems monthly costs are at the moment without updates.
Saleforce changed from free tier to duck you pay me businesses model.
Need to grow. Not in current state. Assuming a 1% conversion, we need a 100x from here to pay 3 clients 10k/mo at $3 per user - ignoring churn.
Not in current state meaning todays network size, or meaning we’re doing something wrong or not doing something we should be?
I’m expecting maybe the next six months to be a pain period for devs - around their time and expenses. Hopefully by six months we will have easier payments, subscriptions, toward a 10X user base, more innovation and reasons to join Nostr - not just social.
We haven’t even tested the market yet with subscriptions.. only very early days and initial learning period.
Meaning not with current active user base.
I think we need a combo of subscriptions, random zaps, marketplace fees (sell stuff), and at least a 10x i users but hopefully 100x.
Need to get influencers in here and start building out the non-social-first clients - music, marketplace, zap to show etc.
I completely agree. Everytime I see a new hug from Jack on my newsfeed, I’m automatically expecting to see a new user and this makes me happy. Is there a way to understand what interest the new users and perhaps build more tools around it ?
You are 💯 correct. Now it runs on a goodwill of devs and others, but with time it’ll not sustain itself. Marketplace(nip-15) might be the solution! 🐶🐾🫡
dev - contributions are separate beast from nostr-microblogging-social media operations cost - both depends significant number of users sharing - at least i know relay operations cost per human general user (not bot /biz advertisement) will be come down small reasonable amount either fixed and/or pay-per-use --- still have freebie service for newcomers n beginners -- this not includes premium content/paywall service professional book n newsletter who now use visa/mc/pp for subscriptions
Volume
These are good questions and observations. I don’t think subscriptions are a bad idea, but I think some people are overly optimistic about how sustainable they are. Everything is subscriptions these days. It doesn’t matter how much you think your product is worth if enough customers don’t agree or won’t pay that much.
7-day retention period for all data.
If you want a long term solution:
1. Host your own relay, and you become responsible for its longevity.
2. Pay a relay to host it for you. Subscription or service model.
3. Ads.
4. #Footstr
There some way that clients can get some percent of zaps when sent while on them?
