Which is the best provider for first time user: Frugal ($40) or Eweka (€47.88) or Newshosting ($71.88)?

Frugal imo is best bang for your buck and you get usenetfarm to go with it.

I agree. Although Usenet.farm is not as useful as it seems at first glance. They say 3000+ retention but that's only for text. Actual files they apparently only save for up to 70 days and only heavily accessed files for longer. That said, their Eweka still mainly fetches almost as much as if going with Eweka directly. The 2600 max retention can be a bit of a disadvantage if looking for very old niche stuff, but you might be able to find that stuff with the blocknews account if paid for a year.
- undefined> I agree. Although Usenet.farm is not as useful as it seems at first glance. They say 3000+ retention but that’s only for text. Actual files they apparently only save for up to 70 days and only heavily accessed files for longer.
  
  i dont disagree, usenet express based services do the same thing with their retention claims as well. it is to bad but it is what it is and no one is able or seems to want to take these services to task over misleading claims.

New user to Usenet and have been using Frugal. While it’s a good deal for the price, I feel like it’s not able to give me good enough results for the content I request. I’m not sure if I need to use a different indexer (using NZBGeek) but I’m not entirely satisfied.

Are you finding the posts to begin with on Geek? How old are the posts that are failing? if they are under 3000 days then they are most likely taken down and it really wont matter which service you use. Copyright requests hit them all. You either need to find a repost on geek or on another indexer or move on. Some stuff is just targeted much more than others. If they are really old posts then you may need an account with higher retention (still no guarantees its there though). that is where the frugal blocknews account with yearly comes into play.

Definitely Eweka as your main server. It has 99.9% of what I grab. Check this to see which providers are on which backbone. You can try to grab some block accounts on other backbones during some sales.

I like Eweke. It has a lot of content!

Late to the party, but I'd suggest signing up a year of Frugal and configure your downloader for all the servers they provide, with the correct priorities set. I had Frugal and Eweka both for a brief time, with Frugal's servers prioritized higher, and it was very rare that Frugal didn't have what I was requesting

I only have experience with newshosting but it’s a fantastic introduction. I’m paying monthly so I can shot around if I decide it’s not for me