As Notd has a different business model than, well, every other public media platform, it's going to be criticized & avoided because it isn't free. However, paying just $5 per month would allow you to subscribe to 500 hundred almost-free (1 cent per month) streams, with no ads and no pimping of sensational posts to get you to subscribe to more streams. And even 500 might be too many subscriptions.

A lot of people follow hundreds or thousand of accounts on twitter. However, they probably miss 90% of the tweets by the people they follow. While we will include every note of every stream you subscribe to in your feed, twitter doesn't do that. So you end up seeing only a fraction of the tweets you expect to be seeing (the traction is smaller as the number of accounts you follow increases). The small amount you pay for each stream you subscribe to is enough to not only fund this service but also helps to optimize your feed for quality.