Yup. They can't just scale up a free service to cover millions -- eventually, even billions! -- of people at peak performance. That's a ridiculous expectation.

Free-to-use software can make sense. Write once, run anywhere. It's a document you can copy.

Free-to-use services is literally not a thing. 

 yeah, nostr's architecture will make scaling large scale relay deployments easy too, probably can build em out of lots of small relays with relay coordinator/proxies around them 

 social network graphs would make sharding super simple to figure out 

 The updated filter.nostr.wine is extremely fast for me. They must have servers spannung the globe, or something.

theforest.nostr1.com is also extremely fast 

 yeah, cloudfodder is pretty good at his work