hodlbod on Nostr: Exactly, but the cost is that clients are incentivized to get bigger and offer more ...

Exactly, but the cost is that clients are incentivized to get bigger and offer more features. Micro clients can't take advantage of cool features because they can't bundle them in a subscription.

A better way would be for users to have a direct relationship with each service which is recorded using nostr events, and which clients can help manage (or a micro-client could be dedicated to managing nostr subscriptions, kind of like apple subscriptions maybe).

I don't have monetization built in yet, but this is kind of how I've structured email subscriptions in Anchor: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/1796