I have all free relays turned off for global. I use nostros and have two feeds. Personal feed and global feed. I still see posts from people I follow from free relays.
You'd have to ask the creator, but that does allow you to post to free relays from this paid relay. Lots of spammers and scammers on free relays and they're basically unusable for global. So if you post to a free relay, and spam and scammer bot could see your post and comment on your post with their scam or spam.
I've been using wss://relay.nostriches.org and wss://bitcoiner.social and my feed has greatly improved except for that damn hell thread of yesterday lol