Nostr integration, justified
Non-Custodial Savings Calculator
Holding custody of user accounts and content is a cost most social apps carry without choosing to. Account support, data storage, security, moderation, compliance and the engineering behind all of it add up to a figure few apps ever see in one place. Nostr integration lets an app release that custody burden and put its effort into the brand and the product instead.
This calculator estimates what custody costs your app today, what a similar app would cost to run on Nostr, and the saving between the two.
Your App Details
Seven questions is enough for a rough estimate. Add more details if you have them. The rest remains an assumption.
Our Assumptions
Typical is what the results show. Low and high bound the range beside every figure, and only the rows under "At scale: Nostr4's thesis" move it, so the band is a statement about the thesis, not about cloud pricing. Everything on the custodial side is held at its typical value in all three cases; the low and high beside those rows are reference points for you to override. Change a typical value, press Recalculate, and the change travels in the results link.
The files behind this
At scale: Nostr4's thesis
These are not estimates of the world as it is but of the world Nostr4 is building: the time for Nostr's standards and infrastructure to reach scale, the share of each cost that remains once an app hosts nothing of its own, and what the market will bear for the Nostr-native services that take its place. Low is the thesis holding less well and the smaller saving; high is it holding better.
| What | Typical | Low | High | Unit | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What an app integrated today already gets: keys, signed events, relays and follows carry most of the custodial cost and work now. User-paid providers, a media market, label and ranking providers and payment conversion are the rest. The ramp runs from here. | 0.15 | 0.45 | ratio | unsourced | ||
| In our reading, an app on Nostr is not a party to the payment, so a store's in-app-purchase rule should not reach it. Some app-store vendors have read it otherwise: in June 2023 one told a Nostr client that tips associated with receiving content from creators through a mechanism other than in-app purchase broke its payment guideline, and gave the app 14 days to comply (CNBC, June 2023). Precedent pending as of October 2026. The low case keeps the whole commission; the high case treats the precedent as settled. | 1.0 | 0.1 | ratio | unsourced | CNBC: a Nostr client given 14 days over tips outside in-app purchase (the precedent, not a figure) 2023-06 | |
| Nostr4's estimate of the time for the network to establish the standards and infrastructure that support Nostr at scale; user growth carries the rest. The ramp starts at scale_progress_today and is front-loaded: the share of the at-scale saving the network delivers in month m is p + (1 − p)(1 − (1 − m/M)²), because the standards already adopted (keys, signed events, relays, follows) carry the bulk of custodial cost (accounts, graph, storage) and deliver early, while the pieces still maturing (user-paid providers, a media market, label and ranking providers, payment conversion) are the tail. A calendar, not a stopwatch: month 1 is January of start_year for every app, and later versions of this file will shorten the time to scale as the network matures. An app's own integration, its time and its cost, is not estimated here: it is settled case by case, in a consult. | 48 | 24 | months | unsourced | ||
| Blossom or similar: users can host their own media, apps often still pay for some of it. | 0.5 | 0.1 | ratio | unsourced | ||
| A thin cache in front of relays, what a Nostr app still serves itself. What the market will bear: no public price list exists, including ours, and at scale there is no vendor to lock an app in. | 0.2 | 0.02 | USD per MAU per year | unsourced | ||
| Age assurance becomes an external layer the app reads rather than buys: as we read them in October 2026, the Texas and Utah laws put it at the app-store, and the EU is building a device-level age wallet under the DSA. The UK Online Safety Act is the residual: in our reading the duty attaches to the service a child can use, wherever sign-up happened, so a client showing others' content may still have to check. Low keeps the UK duty in full; high is the ideal. | 0.5 | 0 | ratio | unsourced | ||
| A key cannot be reset by the app. A non-custodial app's support is a redirect to the user's own or a recommended key-management service; only a share of those redirects reach a person. The contact costs are Gartner's. | 0.1 | 0 | ratio | unsourced | ||
| Web-of-trust ranking or discovery as a service. What the market will bear: no public price list exists, including ours, and at scale there is no vendor to lock an app in. | 0.25 | 0.01 | USD per MAU per year | unsourced | ||
| At scale, assembling feeds from relays on the client is the app's own feed logic. | 0.5 | 0.2 | ratio | unsourced | ||
| In our reading, as of October 2026, the DSA's notice-and-action duties fall on hosting services, and a client that hosts nothing is a weaker target than a platform; the UK Online Safety Act still reaches a service a child can use. Low keeps three quarters of both programs, the same world as moderation's low case: the duties follow whatever the app still hosts. | 0.75 | 0.25 | ratio | unsourced | ||
| For whatever the app still retains privately. | 0.5 | 0.2 | ratio | unsourced | ||
| A policy sized to the data still held. | 0.8 | 0.3 | ratio | unsourced | ||
| Personal data an app still holds on Nostr: scales the expected breach loss and the access requests that remain. | 0.3 | 0.05 | ratio | unsourced | ||
| Classifiers, queues and hash matching give way to label providers and web of trust; what remains is hash matching on anything the app itself hosts. | 0.5 | 0.1 | ratio | unsourced | ||
| Labels and trust scores as a service, the moderation line's Nostr-native cost. What the market will bear: no public price list exists, including ours, and at scale there is no vendor to lock an app in. | 0.05 | 0.005 | USD per MAU per year | unsourced | ||
| Review and ranking move to the network: web-of-trust weighting, interoperable algorithm configs and label events let users curate what they see, so, in our reading, an app that hosts nothing moderates nothing of its own. What remains is illegal-content handling for any relay or media host the app runs, the defaults a new user starts with, and the default filter and the report and block controls the app-stores require. Low keeps half, the same world as the content-law low case. | 0.5 | 0.05 | ratio | unsourced | ||
| OpenNode about 1%; BTCPay Server 0%. The at-scale saving is full conversion of in-app payments to peer-to-peer rails (bitcoin, stablecoins); store rails are unchanged on both sides. As of October 2026 some app-stores' rules still restrict bypassing in-app purchase for digital goods inside the app in some regions, and on-ramp costs are borne by users: they affect conversion, not the app's P&L. | 0.01 | 0 | ratio of revenue | sourced | OpenNode pricing and fees 2026 | |
| An app that never holds funds has far less exposure. | 0.5 | 0.1 | ratio | unsourced | ||
| At scale a Nostr app still builds and keeps signer login, the key hand-off and session handling. Zero remaining is not defensible. | 0.5 | 0.2 | ratio | unsourced | ||
| At scale, relay connection management, caching, media handling and the relay capacity the app rents still need engineering time. | 0.5 | 0.2 | ratio | unsourced | ||
| No operator publishes cost per user. Typical is the sourced operator figure: a thousand active users per vCPU and 2 GB, about 12 USD a month on a European VPS, which is 0.14 a user a year. Low is the same capacity with backups and monitoring; high is the strfry-efficiency claim. Applied to the share of users the app sponsors (relay_sponsored_share), rented from a provider who carries the hosting duties. | 0.25 | 0.05 | USD per MAU per year | weak | OpenSats: Advancements in Nostr Relays (relay.tools hosting at 12,000 sats a month; strfry on a small VPS) 2026-03 | |
| Users who bring their own relay cost the app nothing. The app sponsors capacity for the rest, rented from a provider who, in our reading, carries the hosting duties. What that sponsorship earns as a premium or sponsored add-on is not modelled. | 1 | 0.25 | ratio | unsourced | ||
| The least an app pays however few its users: one managed relay with backups, about 50 a month. The per-user rate takes over above about 4,300 sponsored users, about 8,600 active users at the typical sponsored share. | 1200 | 240 | USD per year | weak | OpenSats: Advancements in Nostr Relays 2026-03 |
Used by more than one line
| What | Typical | Low | High | Unit | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US median for software developers. Infra specialists run higher; the median is the defensible default. | 110000 | 180000 | USD per year | sourced | BLS Occupational Outlook: software developers, median annual wage 2025-05 | |
| Private-industry total compensation divided by wages: benefits are 30% of compensation. | 1.3 | 1.6 | multiplier | sourced | BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, private industry 2026-06 | |
| ECEC excludes non-compensation overhead. A conservative allowance, editable. | 1.05 | 1.25 | multiplier | unsourced | ||
| Derived: Pinterest cost of revenue is 1.36 per MAU-year and Reddit 1.60 per DAU-year (both include hosting, ops staff and fees); Snap infrastructure alone is 3.40 per DAU-year. The typical value nets out storage and egress, which this model counts separately. | 0.5 | 3 | USD per MAU per year | derived | Pinterest FY2025 Form 10-K: cost of revenue and MAU 2026-02 | |
| Used only for a visitor who has not said. An app that gives no growth figure is held flat, so the projection claims nothing about its growth; the growth question on the form is the way to say otherwise. | 0 | 0 | ratio of today's users | unsourced | ||
| Founders' own forecasts fall from 120% to 83% to 60% a year, about 0.7 each year. A doubling app is therefore about 9 times its size in year five, not 32. | 0.5 | 1 | ratio | weak | Equidam: benchmarks for startup revenue growth (15,000+ ventures) 2024 | |
| The media-feed figure, used when the form says nothing about content. | 5 | 50 | count per MAU per month | unsourced | ||
| The media-feed figure, used when the form says nothing about content. | 10 | 200 | MB per MAU | unsourced | ||
| Chat is high volume and small. | 100 | 400 | count per MAU per month | unsourced | ||
| Text with the odd photo. | 1 | 20 | MB per MAU | unsourced | ||
| Text and thumbnails. Replaces egress_gb_per_mau_month when the kind is given. | 0.05 | 1 | GB per MAU per month | unsourced | ||
| Fan-out and presence, little ranking. Replaces compute_per_mau_year when the kind is given. | 0.25 | 1.5 | USD per MAU per year | unsourced | ||
| Most users read; a few post. | 5 | 50 | count per MAU per month | unsourced | ||
| Images and short video, kept. The research puts an image-heavy feed well above the 50 MB generic default. | 100 | 2000 | MB per MAU | unsourced | ||
| The research's 1 to 5 GB a month for an image-heavy feed. Replaces egress_gb_per_mau_month when the kind is given. | 1 | 5 | GB per MAU per month | unsourced | ||
| Ranking, recommendation and transcoding. Replaces compute_per_mau_year when the kind is given. | 1 | 5 | USD per MAU per year | unsourced | ||
| Threads and replies. | 3 | 30 | count per MAU per month | unsourced | ||
| Mostly text, some attachments. | 5 | 80 | MB per MAU | unsourced | ||
| Threads with some images. Replaces egress_gb_per_mau_month when the kind is given. | 0.1 | 2 | GB per MAU per month | unsourced | ||
| Search and notifications more than ranking. Replaces compute_per_mau_year when the kind is given. | 0.3 | 2 | USD per MAU per year | unsourced | ||
| Few posts, each a listing. | 1 | 15 | count per MAU per month | unsourced | ||
| Listing photos add up. | 50 | 1000 | MB per MAU | unsourced | ||
| Listing photos browsed. Replaces egress_gb_per_mau_month when the kind is given. | 0.3 | 3 | GB per MAU per month | unsourced | ||
| Search, matching and payments plumbing. Replaces compute_per_mau_year when the kind is given. | 0.5 | 3 | USD per MAU per year | unsourced | ||
| A solo founder spends a fraction of the default hours on custody work. Applied to the default hours of every area the form leaves blank. | 0.1 | 0.5 | multiplier | unsourced | ||
| The default bands were set with a small team in mind. | 0.5 | 2 | multiplier | unsourced | ||
| Several people on each area. | 1.5 | 6 | multiplier | unsourced | ||
| Whole teams on accounts, content and infrastructure. | 4 | 16 | multiplier | unsourced | ||
| The form asks which regions an app has users in, not how many in each. Each chosen region is weighted by its social media users, so an app in the US and the UK is read as 82% US. Overridable until the form asks for the split. | 254 | 254 | millions of social media users | sourced | DataReportal Digital 2026: the United States of America (social media user identities, October 2025) 2026-02 | |
| As above. | 55.5 | 55.5 | millions of social media users | sourced | DataReportal Digital 2026: the United Kingdom (social media user identities, October 2025) 2026-02 | |
| Derived: about 340 million EU residents aged 16 to 74 (Eurostat, 1 January 2025) at 67% is about 230 million. | 230 | 230 | millions of social media users | derived | Eurostat: digital economy and society statistics, households and individuals (67% of those aged 16 to 74 used social networks in 2025) 2026 | |
| Set equal to the US on purpose: an app that names other regions is assumed to have as many users there as in the US, since the rest of the world is too large to weight by its size. Overridable. | 254 | 254 | millions of social media users | unsourced |
Accounts & personal data
| What | Typical | Low | High | Unit | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The form's bands (0, 1 to 10, 11 to 40, over 40) are read as 0, 5, 25 and 60 hours a week. The slider starts on the band nearest this; a results link that gives no band uses it directly. | 2 | 10 | hours per week | unsourced | ||
| Identity Platform 100k to 1M tier. Low is its 10M-plus tier; high is Clerk beyond 50k. | 0.0025 | 0.02 | USD per MAU per month | sourced | Google Cloud Identity Platform pricing 2026 | |
| No consumer-app source. Editable. | 0.1 | 0.5 | resets per MAU per year | unsourced | ||
| Self-service email or SMS plus a share of support. The 70-dollar figure often cited from Forrester is for enterprise helpdesks and is not used. | 0.1 | 5 | USD per reset | weak | BleepingComputer, citing Forrester on helpdesk password resets 2024-11 | |
| Gartner's 2019 poll: live channels 8.01 a contact, self-service about 0.10. Read when a key hand-off is served by a help page or a redirect rather than a person. | 0.1 | 0.25 | USD per contact | sourced | Gartner, 2019 Customer Service and Support Leader poll 2019-09 | |
| Gartner's 2019 poll: 8.01 a live contact (phone, chat, email); high is the upper end of 2025 benchmarks. | 8.01 | 12 | USD per contact | sourced | Gartner, 2019 Customer Service and Support Leader poll 2019-09 | |
| Stripe Identity document plus selfie; Veriff 0.80 to 1.89 with monthly minimums. | 0.8 | 1.89 | USD per check | sourced | Stripe Identity pricing 2026 | |
| Online Safety Act age assurance applies to services likely to be accessed by children. Editable. | 0.1 | 0.5 | ratio of MAU | unsourced | ||
| Most US social apps run no paid identity check today: the large platforms use age estimation on accounts they suspect are under age and check documents only where a law requires it, and the Texas and Utah app-store laws, as we read them in October 2026, put the age signal at the store rather than in the app. The share is the users an app still sends to a paid check, not the users whose age it knows. | 0 | 0.1 | ratio of MAU | weak | SCOTUSblog: Supreme Court allows Texas to enforce its app store age-verification law (SB 2420) 2026-07 | |
| Editable. | 0.01 | 0.2 | ratio of MAU | unsourced | ||
| Editable. | 0 | 0.1 | ratio of MAU | unsourced |
Social graph & feeds
| What | Typical | Low | High | Unit | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Same bands as above. | 4 | 25 | hours per week | unsourced | ||
| RDS PostgreSQL gp3 Multi-AZ. Low is single-AZ; high is Multi-AZ with readable standbys. Compute instances are extra and not modelled here. | 0.115 | 0.345 | USD per GB-month | sourced | AWS Price List API, Amazon RDS PostgreSQL gp3 us-east-1 2026-10 | |
| Follows, profile, indexes and counters. Editable. | 5 | 100 | MB per MAU | unsourced | ||
| Row plus indexes, not the media. Retention of twelve months is a model constant. | 1 | 5 | KB per post | unsourced | ||
| The rest is serving. Editable. | 0.3 | 0.5 | ratio | unsourced |
Compute & storage
| What | Typical | Low | High | Unit | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Same bands as above. | 4 | 25 | hours per week | unsourced | ||
| S3 Standard first 50 TB. Low is Backblaze B2; high is GCS multi-region. | 0.00695 | 0.026 | USD per GB-month | sourced | AWS Price List API, Amazon S3 us-east-1 2026-10 | |
| Nobody serves media from origin. CloudFront steps from 0.085 (first 10 TB) to 0.030 (over 500 TB), 0.025 (over 1 PB) and 0.020 (over 5 PB); Bunny lists 0.01 standard and 0.005 to 0.003 on its volume tier; Cloudflare R2 egress is zero. The typical value is a large CDN at volume; the high is AWS direct to the internet for anyone still doing that. | 0 | 0.09 | USD per GB | sourced | Amazon CloudFront pay-as-you-go pricing: data transfer out, United States and Europe 2026-10 | |
| No platform publishes bytes served per user. The only proxy is 22 GB per smartphone per month across all apps. | 0.3 | 5 | GB per MAU per month | unsourced | Ericsson Mobility Report key figures (22 GB per smartphone per month, all apps) 2025 |
Compliance & liability
| What | Typical | Low | High | Unit | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deletion flows, export tooling, retention jobs. Same bands as above. | 0 | 5 | hours per week | unsourced | ||
| Vendor ranges: micro 5k to 15k EUR, small 15k to 50k. Outsourced DPO alone runs 1,500 to 8,000 per month. | 10000 | 50000 | USD per year | weak | Legiscope: GDPR compliance cost ranges for SMEs (vendor estimate) 2026 | |
| Impact assessment, 2019 prices: ongoing 6,040 GBP with moderation and risk assessment, plus 7,460 GBP transition spread over three years; low is the 87 GBP basic case; high is a small high-risk service at 50,800 GBP. Converted at 1.30 USD per GBP. | 3000 | 65000 | USD per year | derived | DSIT Online Safety Act enactment impact assessment, tables 49 to 52 2024-10 | |
| Point of contact, legal representative outside the EU, notice-and-action, statements of reasons. The only published figure is the Commission's 1,500 EUR setup estimate. | 1500 | 20000 | USD per year | unsourced | ACT position paper citing the Commission's DSA notice-and-action setup cost 2021 | |
| Policy, COPPA posture, basic counsel. | 1000 | 10000 | USD per year | unsourced | ||
| Counsel, opt-out mechanisms, state-law tracking. | 5000 | 50000 | USD per year | unsourced | ||
| The law applies above 25M USD revenue, or 100k California consumers or households, or 50% of revenue from selling personal information. Compared against US users × the California share. | 100000 | 100000 | consumers | sourced | California Attorney General: CCPA thresholds 2026 | |
| Used only to test the CCPA threshold, which counts consumers a year, not monthly actives. Access-request volume stays per monthly user. | 1 | 3 | multiplier | unsourced | ||
| DataGrail's 2024 benchmark is about 0.00024 a visitor a year; its 2023 report put it at 859 per million identities (0.00086), which is the high. Its customers are companies that bought privacy tooling, so both figures lean high for a consumer app. The 3.2 per thousand figure attributed to DLA Piper is an enterprise, manual-handling number and is not used. Applied to EU and UK users always, and to US users only at or above the CCPA threshold. | 5e-05 | 0.001 | requests per MAU per year | weak | DataGrail 2025 Data Privacy Trends (webinar): 1,215 requests per 5 million monthly unique visitors in 2024 2025 | |
| Automated consumer export: a support touch plus an export job. Gartner's 1,524 a request (via DataGrail) is for an enterprise request handled by hand and is not used; the high is a quarter-hour of a privacy engineer plus review. On Nostr the requests fall with the data retained (retained_data_share), not to zero. | 5 | 150 | USD per request | unsourced | ||
| Median of policies sold. Scales with data held. | 1200 | 7000 | USD per year | derived | Insureon: cyber liability insurance cost for small businesses 2026-04 | |
| IRIS 2025 models a 9.3% chance that a typical firm has a significant incident in a year (2024), with firms under 10M revenue at 0.60× that (5.6%) and the information sector at 8.4%. Cross-check: a small-business cyber policy at 1,552 a year and the 2025 industry loss ratio of 53% (NAIC) imply insurers expect to pay out about 820 a year per small policy, far below this row's expected loss, because the row counts the whole loss and the policy pays only part of it. Shown as risk exposure, apart from the cash costs. | 0.02 | 0.1 | ratio | derived | Cyentia Institute, IRIS 2025: annualized incident probability (Figure 6, Figure A2) 2026-03 | |
| IBM stopped publishing a per-record figure; earlier editions ran around 150 to 165 per record for large organisations. IRIS 2025 puts the median loss for a firm under 100M revenue at 357k. The typical value is deliberately far below the per-record figure. | 5 | 150 | USD per user | unsourced | IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2026: global average 2026 | |
| The 2026 global mean. High is the US mean reported from the same edition. Expected loss is never scaled above it. | 4990000 | 11500000 | USD | sourced | IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2026: global average 2026 | |
| 39.36 million of 341.8 million. The CCPA threshold counts California consumers, so it is compared against the app's US users times this share, not against total MAU. | 0.115 | 0.115 | ratio | sourced | US Census Bureau QuickFacts: California and the United States, population estimates July 1, 2025 2026 |
Moderation
| What | Typical | Low | High | Unit | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Payscale median 70,480; Glassdoor average 101,409 (small samples, self-reported). | 70480 | 101409 | USD per year | weak | Payscale: Trust and Safety Analyst salary 2025-03 | |
| Payscale median 20.44 per hour over 2,080 hours. | 38000 | 55000 | USD per year | weak | Payscale: Content Moderator hourly rate 2025-07 | |
| Offshore list price about 8 per hour over 2,000 hours; US BPO 15 to 25 per hour. List prices, not contracts. | 12000 | 32000 | USD per seat per year | weak | 365outsource: content moderation outsourcing rates 2026 | |
| From DSA transparency reports: LinkedIn about 3, Pinterest at most 5, Snap about 15 per million EU users. Used when the form gives no reviewers at all. | 3 | 15 | people per 1M MAU | sourced | Snap DSA transparency report H2 2025 (human resources and AMAR files) 2026-04 | |
| Classifiers, queues, hash matching. Vendor pricing is per item and unpublished at small scale. | 0.01 | 0.2 | USD per MAU per year | unsourced | ||
| Editable. | 0.05 | 0.2 | ratio | unsourced | ||
| The 'up to 5' band's figure. | 1 | 15 | people | unsourced |
Payments
| What | Typical | Low | High | Unit | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30% worldwide; 26% under the EU terms effective 2026-10-01. Subscriptions drop to 15% after the first year, not modelled. | 0.26 | 0.3 | ratio of in-app revenue | sourced | Apple App Store Small Business Program 2026 | |
| Under 1M USD of prior-year proceeds. | 0.15 | 0.15 | ratio of in-app revenue | sourced | Apple App Store Small Business Program 2026 | |
| US, UK and EEA from 2026-06-30: 20% new installs or 25% existing, plus 5% if Play Billing is used. Other markets 30%. | 0.2 | 0.3 | ratio of in-app revenue | sourced | Google Play service fees (US, UK and EEA from 2026-06-30; other markets) 2026-06 | |
| 10% service fee plus 5% billing fee in the US, UK and EEA; 15% elsewhere. | 0.1 | 0.15 | ratio of in-app revenue | sourced | Google Play service fees (US, UK and EEA from 2026-06-30; other markets) 2026-06 | |
| Both stores step at 1M USD a year. | 1000000 | 1000000 | USD per year | sourced | Apple App Store Small Business Program 2026 | |
| Stripe US 2.9%; low is Stripe UK domestic cards 1.5%; high is PayPal Checkout 3.49%. | 0.015 | 0.0349 | ratio of web revenue | sourced | Stripe pricing (US) 2026 | |
| Stripe 0.30; UK 20p; PayPal 0.49. | 0.2 | 0.49 | USD per transaction | sourced | Stripe pricing (US) 2026 | |
| Paddle and Lemon Squeezy list 5% plus a fixed fee; the reseller is the seller and carries sales tax and VAT. | 0.05 | 0.08 | ratio of reseller revenue | derived | Paddle pricing (merchant of record) 2026 | |
| Per checkout. | 0.5 | 0.5 | USD per transaction | derived | Paddle pricing (merchant of record) 2026 | |
| Turns revenue into a transaction count for the fixed fee. A bigger ticket means fewer fees, so low is the larger ticket. | 30 | 5 | USD | unsourced | ||
| Counsel and structuring for in-app balances or payouts; the exposure, not an outcome. Charged only when the app holds user balances, credits or wallets. | 2000 | 50000 | USD per year | unsourced |
Fill in App Details and press Calculate.
Estimated Savings
Projected Nostr Integration
{year} Custodial cost per user
{year} Nostr cost per user
{year} Cost of Nostr app
Year by year
| Year |
|---|
| Active users |
| Cost of Custody |
| Cost of Nostr |
| Estimated Saving |
| Cumulative Estimate |
Non-Custody Savings in Detail
| Value Center | 2030 Estimated Savings | Estimated Share Saved | Post Integration | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Accounts & personal data
Already on Nostr
Partly on Nostr
No in-app payments
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Apps integrate signer login and point users who need help with their keys to a key-management service. Where the law asks for an age signal, you read it from the network or the wallet. | ||||||||
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Social graph & feeds
Already on Nostr
Partly on Nostr
No in-app payments
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Apps assemble feeds on the client from third party services. Ranking and discovery come from a provider chosen by apps or users. | ||||||||
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Compute & storage
Already on Nostr
Partly on Nostr
No in-app payments
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Apps may rent relay capacity for the users who don't bring their own and choose to host only selected media. A thin cache and the engineering to run it may also be provided by apps. | ||||||||
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Compliance & liability
Already on Nostr
Partly on Nostr
No in-app payments
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In our reading, content-law duties follow only what apps choose to host, and privacy duties, access requests and breach exposure follow what apps choose to retain. | ||||||||
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Moderation
Already on Nostr
Partly on Nostr
No in-app payments
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Review, ranking and filtering come from label and web-of-trust providers on the network, chosen by users. Apps answer for the defaults a new user starts with, the report and block controls that app stores require, and any storage relay run by the app. | ||||||||
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Payments
Already on Nostr
Partly on Nostr
No in-app payments
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Payments settle on users' own rails. An app-store may still claim its commission on peer-to-peer payments until the precedent for non-custodial payments is settled. An app selling its own products in-app still pays the app-store's commission. | ||||||||
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· Estimates from public benchmarks and Nostr4's assumptions; not legal, tax or financial advice.
Nostr at Scale
Nostr4 exists to grow the network of independent social apps. We are actively developing the infrastructure and standards, and the onboarding services, that let an app release custody without losing its users. We expect non-custody to be fully supported on Nostr within three years. That is the tipping point from which Nostr scales.