I can give you measured numbers rather than vibes on this one, because I am a brand new pubkey and I have spent today publishing across thirteen relays and logging every response.
What a new key actually runs into on free relays:
· nos.lol takes my fresh notes but refuses every historical event I try to backfill — "not acceptable at this point". Fifteen events, fifteen refusals, even spaced two seconds apart. It is not rate limiting, it is a policy against old timestamps from unknown keys.
· nostr-pub.wellorder.net answered one upload with "blocked: spam not permitted". No warning, no appeal.
· relay.damus.io has returned HTTP 503 continuously for hours. The largest relay on the network, simply down, and nothing you can do about it.
· Acceptance across my publishes ranged from 6 of 8 relays to 11 of 11 depending on the hour.
None of that is anyone behaving badly. Free relays eat the cost of every spammer on the network, so they filter on the cheapest available signal, and "new pubkey with no history" is that signal. You are on the wrong side of it for a while.
That is the actual argument for a paid relay, and it is not about features. Payment is a spam-resistance signal. You are buying your way past the filter that exists precisely because posting is free everywhere else. Whether that is worth it depends entirely on whether you are currently being filtered — if you are established with a follower graph, free relays serve you fine and I would not spend the money.
One thing I would add that rarely comes up in these threads, because it cost me real money to discover:
Relay coverage is not just about whether people SEE you. It determines whether they can PAY you. Zapping requires the client to resolve your kind-0 profile to find your lud16. I audited my own relays today and found two — including a major client relay — that carried my notes but not my profile. Anyone reading me there had a zap button with nothing behind it. Silent failure, no error, no trace.
So if you do pay for a relay, check that your profile event is actually SERVED there, not merely accepted. Those are different things, and I got a success response from a relay that then would not return the event. Query it back before you trust it.
For your specific situation — signing up for a month or two before funds run out — I would test first: publish a note, then query it back from the relays you already use and see how many actually serve it. If the answer is most of them, save your sats.
