Is it on US1? I would expect the US1 invoice run to get finalized later today. Some invoices like yours get finalized automatically but other invoices will need to get checked by out accounting team before running the final command.
It’s on EU1, and this post has at least 20 characters
I thought for a moment that might be a bug and asked around. Turns out EU1 and AP1 are also waiting for the final green light. I hope we will get it today.
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What does “prepay via a partner” mean? There’s an “add funds” button in billing settings, I’m able to pay an arbitrary cash amount into account funds. This seems to not have a minimum at this point. If $10 is prepaid into account funds in one transaction here, will that cause invoices to still be increased to the $5 minimum each month (from Sep onward), or will the $5 minimum no longer apply as the only cash transaction was >$5?
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It’s when you register an account with a partner code, for example like IX+Storj and subscribed to the IX Starter Package, which exactly the prepaid model.
“Add funds” option doesn’t give an exemption from the minimum fee, only STORJ tokens.
It’s not an additional fee, it’s more like a rounding. If your usage is greater than zero, but the invoice sum less than $5, it will be $5. If it’s greater or equal than $5, the invoice will not be changed.
That is daft. If it was for fiat transaction fees, that’s maybe understandable, because there are ways to accommodate a provider needing to offset transaction fees, such as enforcing a minimum transaction amount. Every small business in my local area does this, if your purchase is less than $5 there’s either a 1% fee or a 10c fee, because the financial institution imposes it so they pass it on. But this (specifically this new policy’s effect, i’m applying no moral judgement to any singular person) is just greedy.
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Costs includes not only processing fee of the payment provider, but also other costs related to the account and stored data.
All reasons are described in the first post, please read it.
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I’ve read it a few times and am aware of the changes being implemented starting in September. I have a couple issues with it beyond what I’ve said above:
That’s a bug/loophole in your billing that can be patched. Backblaze advertised that their Cloudflare peering was free for customers, but it wasn’t really, the fees just went from download cost to a different request class. And that’s fine. If they’re not paying for requests for some reason, or if they’re abusing the S3 gateway, or if web hosting via a bucket costs more than the pure download cost, whatever the behind-the-scenes explanation for this: introduce billing for that, patch that bug.
Introducing a minimum amount that all invoices are rounded up to is sidestepping the issue. What happens when customers on a $5 bill are actually using $10 of resources? Or actually using $100 of resources?
Then how does increasing it to $5 affect anything? You might as well raise the minimum to $50 a month, and/or change your business model to only sell to other businesses, requiring proof that a customer’s usage of the service will be economically viable for Storj, and/or pointing potential small customers to resellers/other services like B2 because Storj is objectively not the best fit for some use cases. These would be relatively acceptable options.
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I’ve inferred from these discussions that such small users, with/without billing issues, do not look good (from their POV) on some number that investors look at. It achieves shoving these people out the door without explicitly saying they are unwelcome.
They threw STORJ payers a bone because crypto is still a hurdle to overcome for the typical user. Notice they still have to pay gas fees to collect the STORJ.
It will start in August. Please don’t mix up the time the invoice gets created and the timespan it covers.
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EU1, still can’t delete account.
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Agree. I deleted all access keys and buckets before the end of June. The June invoice was issued but I am still unable to delete the final project, before deleting the account…
@heunland - tagging you for the spelling mistake highlighted in the image above.
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Please file a support ticket if you are having issues deleting your account.
We have already informed the dev team about the typo, thanks!
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PR is already merged.
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Just managed to delete my account on EU1.
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today I see a very deep nose dive on my Storj node, then I check the forum. Very nice guys. I think I may go off too as a SNO.
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Jesus Christ, is it impossible for me to be gone on holidays for two weeks without having this company disintegrate into several fractions going in different directions?
$StorjLads, please. When you take decisions, sleep a day or two on them before posting them. And when you do, is Friday afternoon really the correct time to do so? Last time there was townhall, it was announced after it was already held.
The very last day of May, this change is then pushed through, worded in a way where it seems as though it would take effect the first of June, and then -the very next day- it’s rolled back, then changed, and now it seems as though it’s effectively cancelled for users paying with StorJ.
Where is the company I know? Was I duped, or did it start deconstructing once mr. Winegar took over the reins?
Please don’t let the last few strings of mishaps be the first steps on the path to something bad, and please let them be human errors as the new management spends their first 6 months getting known with all areas of the company.
When the changes to the payouts were made, at least it felt like my opinion mattered when you made the post announcing the changes before they happened.
I truely believe in StorJ.
I love the customer-first approach, I love being able to provide an (performant!) alternative to the large tech companies, and I love getting paid for my hobby. Going by what is publicly available, the next year is going to be extremely interesting. After the unpaid data has been cleaned up, I’m seeing growth on my nodes again, and the future looks bright from my outlook.
Please don’t kill it by alienating 80% of your userbase.
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You talk like they really care. Lol.
I think they do.
Not caring about your users is simply a bad business decision, and you have to be Broadcom big for it to work. I think StorJlads are in a period where multiple acquisitions, new business areas, customers and opportunities clouds the vision of who they were with the vision of what they might be.
I’m all for the company changing, maturing and evolving. But that can only be done on the stepping stones of what it is now, and is not done by throwing what’s here now away.
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IMO it’s that their business model or their systems or whatever is inefficient. Yes, if 10000 people give you $1, you have $10000. The proble is how much effort you have to put in to get that $1.
We run nodes with little effort, beyond the initial set up and some occasional thoubleshooting. Our costs are mainly hardware and electricity. If a node uses $10 of electricity per month and gets $11/month, you can say that you earned a whole dollar of profit. Maybe you can discount the electricity cost, because that server would be on anyway, so it’s $11 profit.
But, imagine a different scenario. A node uses $10/month in terms of electricity (let’s say that the server is on all the time, but the node has filled up some hard drives and those drives are essentially dedicated). You need to spend 3 hours/month taking care of the node (upating it, restarting it because it crashes sometimes etc). For that you get $11. One dollar of profit. Would it be worth it? Likely not.
This is what I usually talk about when we talk about running nodes and that a new node is not going to earn prety much anything, but it would still require some maintenance and that some people, including me, have some level of “worth it”. Just like I do not run a miner that consumes $1000/month of electricity and mines $1001 of BTC.
The same can be said about the Storj company and its customers. Even worse, where a node operator can say that hes not really interested in money and is doing this for fun, using already-on hardware or doing it “to support the project”, a company really cannot do that. A company does everything for money (directly or indirectly).
Maybe having a customer with any amount of data over 0 costs Storj $2/month or whatever in addition to what the data costs, so, a customer with 1kB of data, it is just a loss.
I can use the example of domain name registration. Usually the company makes 1EUR/year from that. If the customer wants any support, he will likely never be profitable to you. Of course, some other customers probably also use hosting services or something else that have higher profit and someone like me is just part of the cost. Still, the company has to have lots of such customers and be really efficient at handling them. In theory, having 100k customers will get you 100kEUR/year, but in practice handling all those customers is probably not free.
Same here. Maybe Storj is not as efficient for the small scale. There are also ways to abuse the service, in a way that the customer would not consider abuse. Uploading and deleting lots of files an hour later costs Storj a lot, but maybe the customer actually has such use case and is not just doing it to hurt the company.
I have seen a few suggestions on how to improve this (from memory).
- Charge for ingress (maybe only under certain conditions)
Maybe that would work, it would also likely chase the “upload lots of files and delete them” customer away. Implementing that would likely require a lot of effort, especially if you wat to make various conditions where ingress is free (like it is today) - Charge for support / offer forum-only support for small customers
IMO this would not work, as in some cases the small customers are the most demanding ones (and most stingy). Not providing actual support for a paid service would likely look bad if some of those customers decided to complain in public spaces. Or their problems would involve their personal data/keys/whatever that cannot be posted on a public forum, so a Storj empolyee would still have to look at it. - Prepay a larger amount to reduce transaction fees
Likely the problem is not just the transaction fees, but the cost of keeping that customer. Yes, Storj changed the rules so the customers that pay with tokens are exempt. I’m sure they will still lose money on these customers but it was done for public relations, likely there are not that many people who pay with tokens and those who do likely are more able to solve their problems without involving support. - Charge for the gateway usage
This I agree with, especially for small customers, a big one can negotiate separately.
But the bigger problem is that it may not be “worth it”. Storj could spend a lot of time and effort (=money) figuring out how to lose less money (or even make some) on a guy with 1GB of data, but is it really the proper way to do it? Maybe money/effort is better spent improving the service for a customer with 10PB of data?
The first post says that 80% of customers pay less than $5/month and, in turn, generate less than 2% of revenue (and a loss). How much money and effort should Storj spend to get those customers to be profitable without actually chasing them away?
If someone is currently paying $1/month and does not like the $5 minimum, he will likely not like the changed pricing that still makes him pay $5, but this time not as a “minimum”, but as gateway cost, ingress cost, segment fee, support fee etc? How many of those 80% would leave because thy now need to pay more?
How much effort/money should Storj spend to make the $1/month (or $0.1/month) earn them at least some profit? What would be ROI on that? Maybe it’s not possible to do that without restructuring the whole company and satellite system. Maybe redesigning everything would make the service worse for the big customers?
I honestly do not know how to make a profit from storing 1GB or even 100GB of data, but not charging the custome rmuch more than what Storj charges now. Even just putting the data on some server (completely centralized). My node makes $28/month. Would I run a service that makes $28/month, but I have to deal with 5-100 different customers? Defnitely not.
I agree about the warning time. I mean, sending the notice on the last working day of the month (Friday) evening, giving people two days to make a choice, really?
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