does looks like someone up there trying to kill off this project, probably some big boys out there. the minimum charges does looks like someone getting a big pay check or increment just to do this process.
i got like 10 buckets in my account. does this means i need to pay for all buckets ? or just 1 account for 5 usd ?
sound like some vmware moves. kill 80% of customers to maintain only 20%. and slowly charge them premium price for it.
I understand all the economics. But please answer this: why would accounts WITHOUT any data/project be charged 50c/month? I never heard of any service doing this: normally leads are value (a dormant account holder has less friction when they decide to actually use the service).
50c is the cost of being a row in your db?
Will you be charging account opening in the future? I guess you can if you make depositing storj or link a CC to account mandatory. But this is the first time I’ve heard a service charging for keeping an account in the db
If you’re not storing data, you aren’t charged anything. If you’re storing something… and paying in STORJ tokens: then the minimum is $0.50/month. If you’re paying in credit/fiat, the minimum is $5.00/month.
And if I said anything incorrect… have no fear… someone will correct me 
Investors should be very concerned. If customer with a $0.70 stake can cause $160 losses, then there is a severe problem.
Imagine an adversary creating 1000 fake accounts like that, potentially causing $160,000 losses in one month with only $700 at stake. Storj’s competitors could ruin the company in a blink. Neither a minimum fee of $0.50 or $5 will help you there. Storj will have to fix the root cause.
And by the way with STORJ token this situation is even worse because it is more easy to create fake accounts without credit card data but with anonymous tokens.
Another reason to get rid of the tokens completely.
Can’t imagine any VC to invest into this otherwise great idea of storage with these pitfalls in sight.
To my knowledge there is no referral program. Something like this was suggested in the past:
They might have invested heavily by offering space at cheap subsidies rates but in my opinion there was never a really strategic and consistent approach to leverage the number of SNOs, customers, volunteers, Github contributors etc. as a source to refer the product and make it traceable who referred who.
But there was so much more that could have been done…
The Storj footprint on social media is still so small, it hardly gets mentioned in relevant threads when people with petabytes of storage requirements are looking for a new home for their data.
“80% of paying customers currently pay less than $5 a month, but cost much more than what we earn from them.” Then fix your billing. Losing 80% of your customers to become dependent on whales is peak late capitalism.
Seeking VC money is a very very very bad move. They want their 10x gains in 5-10 years and than they are gone, the project can burn afterwards for all they care.
Don’t go that route! I’m not speeking from gossips. Do your research!
It may not be possible. It could be that the Storj service has quite large fixed costs which makes it unprofitable to host small customers. Just like some companies only deal with wholeale customers and as a private person you cannot buy one item from them, you have to go to a retailer.
Let’s say a customer opens a support ticket because he has some kind of problem using the service. Storj suport people spend 1 hour resolving it (let’s say it’s a simple problem with the customer and no changes in code are needed). USA minimum wage is $7.25/hour , but it likely costs the company more because taxes, let’s just say $10. The customer stores only a small amount of data and pays $0.1/month. How long will it take Storj to earn back the $10 it spent on resolving the ticket?
It’s similar to domain names, at least where I live. There is enough competition that when I register a domain name, the company earns 1EUR. Yeah, 1EUR/year. Let’s say I do not use any other services from the company. The company has to be really efficient so that sending me the invoice and accepting payment through various bank services does not cost more than that 1EUR. Sure, some companies can do that and they probably earn enough money from thousands of customers, but it likely is that the domain name is a loss for them, but they hope that I would use some of their other services and make up that loss.
Some Storj customers are probably paying less than $1/year. It’s just not profitable.
I am sure it is possible to make a profit from lots of small customer,s but it likely can not be done with the Storj infrastucture or have the same reliability and performance that would suit large customers.
Most of us here are node operators. We run nodes for quite a low pay, for example my node earned $28 in May. Imagine running a similar service (on the same hardware) for the same money, but gaving to deal with, say, 30 different customers who each pay $1/month on average. Or how about 300 different customers where two of them pay $25/month combined and the rest make up the $3/month. Wouldn’t getting rid of the 298 customers who pay $3/month in total make sense?
So OK, you get rid off those small customers, meaning 80%, and 5% of data, and you turn losses into gains?
You will be proffitable than?
Now storage dosen’t cost you anything, but when the Storj token runs out, you will still be proffitable, when you start to put money into storage too?
If both answears are YES, than you don’t need external capital.
But as I read it, the answear is NO, so, what other solutions are there besides VC money?
Ouh, I know: rise the price per TB stored and per egress! 
… what we are saying for the past 3 years. We are to cheap and we have the best performance on the market. Something is not right!
Then by all means, Storj should become a wholesaler. I’d sign up with a business reselling Storj’s service of encryption and international crowd-sourced distribution, I don’t know if it’s the largest of its kind but it’s definitely the easiest to use. If they don’t want small customers, that’s their prerogative to refocus, but I’d rather be told “we are closing down your service with x months notice because your usage is below our $5 minimum” than “we’re raising your invoice from $2 to $5 arbitrarily because actually you cost us a lot more to run than we’d previously let on”
What’s positive about that is that big companies don’t care so much about prices.
You see that with the Select network offering but also from the prices competitors charge. So maybe Storj can charge more for storage and introduce a gateway charge in the futue.
What big companies are looking for is reliability, that’s why the big players can charge almost anything to them. The reliability part is where Storj keeps failing when they announce changes on short notice creating unnecessary frenzy everywhere. And then the pull back over the feedback they receive. Terrible. This erodes trust and makes Storj unattractive even for and especially for larger companies.
It was suggested in the past to increase prices for the Public network at the same time when all the other competitors took their chance for more profitability and increased the prices here:
Well, chance missed.
It was also suggested to charge extra for the gateway usage. Running the gateway effectively costs money for Storj both for ingress and egress while these costs get not at all charged to the customer. Ingress is free and egress costs only for data sent to the gateway but not from the gateway to the customer/user. This is a fundamental flaw.
Imagine what Storj could charge if finally the Public network was in compliance with all necessary regulations. It would be best of class in (almost) any way you could think of.
They could make it so that ingress is free but once you start TTL under 1 day, the charge minimum 1 day or even 1 week. So there is an incentive only to use such low TTL spans if it is really required by the customer.
Or they could make different TTLs: Uploading via self-hosted gateway and Uplink, no restriction, so that even 1 second TTl are possible. But upload via Storj gateway, restrict TTL to 1 day or whatever is required to prevent abuse.
I would prefer the latter (what Storj actually did) just maybe with more advanced warning. Lets say my usage was such that I paid $4.8/month. I would likely be OK with the price going up slightly instead of being told to get lost or upload more data so my monthly bill is $5.
I don’t think it would be that difficult to do, Storj already supports different buckets with different access keys, though maybe they should make it possible to log is as a sub-user (kind-of like DirectAdmin with resellers and users) and show support contacts for the reseller.
I would be fine with this.
I’m very pessimistic about VC. It’s not FUD, I supported pretty much every single change that happened in the psat few years. Of course, I wish this works out for Storj, but historically it does not end well for vast majority of those who went that route: as soon as company starts focusing on plesaing investors and/or shareholderes it’s almost impossible to keep original mission and focus.
Yes, me too. But I don’t think VC will get us there. Or, shoudl I say, it probably will – but it will be a very differnt company, with a differnet mission, and different product.
As for me, I see venture capital (VC) in a very positive light. Hardly any startup can scale without VC.
And without the “economy of scale,” STORJ won’t be able to survive in the long run.
Moreover, VC investors thoroughly review the numbers and the company itself. That increases my trust in the business, its leadership, and the business plan.
The only downside, in my opinion, is that the STORJ token is becoming more and more marginalized because of this.
Just my 2 cents.
For me that’s not downside at all. In my opinion the STORJ token is obsolete, has served its purpose and should be dropped. Storj shall focus on reliably sending fiat (and potentially receiving) money the traditional way with low cost. And they should get rid of how it is perceived as blockchain and cryptocurrency company. If they must stick to cryptocurrency they shall switch to a stable coin. The STORJ token is a unnecessary burden in any way.
Hopefully what could be done with VC money is to increase market visibility and enter markets outside of the US, maybe through local sales teams and more presence on industry events.
Most people around here have the memory of a goldfish (irrefutable fact).
We went from “this is the last adjustment to payouts” to “we need to get more money to grow” in the past 1.5 years.
To me this sounds like the price for the product was chosen based on a die roll, yeap, this is how much we’ll charge customers, and (another roll) this is how much we’ll pay SNOs. Pub anyone?
If storj isn’t profitable (it has been for the past 2 years, consistently pulling in higher and higher net profits) then the only thing that needs to be adjusted is the price to the product. But wait! There’s more!
Last time a price hike (to align with pretty much everyone else in the industry) was suggested (as shown in a previous reply that most people may have forgotten by now, remember, goldfish) the response was “if we increase our prices then there won’t be any clients left, think of the horrors!!!”.
Here are my suggestions:
I will give you a short answer. It is possible to close the account. The screenshot you posted is telling you exactly that. If you also read the annoncement one more time you might notice that the May invoice that will go out around the 4th of June and also the June invoice that will go out around the 4th of July will not contain the minimum fee. So there is no reason to panic.