Vertex is Now Free

Since our February launch, Vertex has evolved its services and gained the confidence of projects that trust it for spam protection, such as:

• #asknostr- a Q&A community on top of Nostr.
• Jellyfish - a modern and spam-free Nostr relay.
• Satlantis - a travel and community social network.
• npub.world - the Nostr profile search engine.
• Zapstore - the app store powered by your social graph.
• Sovran - a Bitcoin and ecash wallet with built-in nostr search.

However, after speaking with many Nostr developers, we discovered an unexpected hurdle: Vertex’s current authorization model — signing each request with a Nostr key — is difficult for many apps to implement.

The Challenge

To use Vertex, each request must be signed with a Nostr key that has enough credits. This works much like traditional APIs, where an API key authenticates each request and links it to an account or quota.

But for Nostr clients this is a major hurdle, as they are mostly client-side applications:

• They don’t have, and don’t want, a backend that could approve or sign requests on behalf of the app.
• They also can’t safely embed a key inside the app itself, as any secret can be extracted with enough effort.

As a result, even though many developers were happy to pay for Vertex’s features, the need for a backend stopped them from integrating it.

What about ecash?

Ecash is a great technology and, in theory, the perfect solution to this problem. Clients could prompt their users to embed ecash tokens inside each request, or tie them directly to the Vertex pubkey, completely removing the need for authorization.

But perfect technical solutions aren’t always practical. Imagine being asked every time you want to search something with an annoying prompt like this one.

The mental cost associated with these repeated decisions quickly becomes unbearable. Some of this can be automated, but not completely solved. And what happens if a user doesn’t even have an ecash wallet?

We’re still very bullish on ecash in the long term and plan to integrate it in the future, just not right now.

Our Solution: Make It Free

Sometimes the simplest, “left-curve” solutions are the best ones.
Starting today, all pubkeys* get 100 free credits per day.

Here is what this means:

• Clients can now sign requests with the user’s own key.
• Users can access Vertex features without paying anything.
• Developers no longer need to manage secrets or run backends to integrate Vertex.

This change reflects our mission to make Vertex accessible, frictionless, and open for all developers. By removing the main barrier, we hope to empower Nostr developers to build apps with excellent UX — apps capable of onboarding millions of new users.

What are you waiting for? Check out our docs and get started in 5 minutes!

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