Well, until ecash I don’t think there’s anyway to have paid relays that can support anonymous npubs, and all the good privacy stuff requires that. So it’s free relays or bust without it. My hope is that it gets so cheap that $1 a year is all that’s needed for low usage folks.
I think protonmail is a good analogy. It offers alternatives to googles free options and cost money and there’s definitely a market for that. But lots of people still use Google.
The thing I didn’t mention is, AI is forcing publishers and content creators to re-think access. Cloudflare’s pay per crawl and companies like Tollbit are restructuring the web to be payment based, which could help lead the paradigm shift.