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.
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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what 2 days, people had 1 month to make choise, after change now they have 2 months.
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This is a well articulated explanation of the problem we are facing and the tradeoffs we have had to manage. I agree that we could have done a better job making the timelines more clear and longer. We also could have sought community input in advance. So we definitely had some room for improvement and have learned some lessons from this experience.
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Hi. I’ve been following the developments of this news and waiting to see if it makes sense to delete my account or continue to use Storj.
Maybe it’s in this thread somewhere, but I don’t have time to read 130 posts. Can please clarify here and update your page (Understanding Storj Pricing Structure - Storj Docs) regarding:
“If you prepay via a partner or pay with STORJ token, you will not be charged a minimum usage fee.”
What does “partner” mean? How much do I need to prepay? And will you be setting up reoccurring option to prepay with a partner?
I’m happy to prepay a reasonable amount in USD to avoid the $5/mo minimum, but I’m not interested in using STORJ tokens for a variety of reasons.
Thank you.
Reminder that Storj token price fluctuations are irrelevant once you have deposited the tokens in your account, as we credit you with the USD equivalent value at time of deposit. So STORJ price volatility will not result in the account Storj balance fluctuating.
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ok. I revised my post. I’m not interested in using STORJ tokens for a variety of reasons. My questions remain:
What does “partner” mean? How much do I need to prepay? And will you be setting up reoccurring option to prepay with a partner?
Resellers like iXsystems (TrueNAS). You need to buy their product.
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Perhaps you did not have enough reasons to use storj tokens before: 10% discount on storage was the only benefit, and if you don’t store massive amount of data it’s irrelevant (which is the point)
Now you have another reason: to avoid minimum fee.
It may still be not enough for you to pay with tokens and it’s fine. But the option is there. Choice is yours.
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@arrogantrabbit thanks for the info. My understanding is: Because I own no crypto, I would need to create some crypto account somewhere, buy ethereum with USD and send it to storj to convert to STORJ tokens. Do I have that right? If so, not an endeavor I would be willing to undertake.
@Bryanm Why not just let people prepay directly with a credit card?
This basically supports what I have suggested:
You could try to find a swap service yourself where you can buy STORJ token directly with credit card without having to open an account and have them sent directly to your Storj accounts STORJ token address.
More or less. The easiest would be to buy tokens on the exchange and send them to the deposit address found in your storj account.
I completely understand, it’s a hassle.
But if, say, you plan to store 20TB of data, then 10% saving every month translates into $100 annual savings. It may be worth it to spend 5 min clicking a few buttons to save $100 every year.
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Customers already have the option to prepay with cards, however, doing so will not exempt their accounts from the minimum fee unless they signed up through a partner portal.
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Well, I thought I had found the best cloud storage around for the best price, too. Turns out that was not the case at all.
This absolutely atrocious idea along with the horrible handling of the announcement has completely changed my opinion of this company.
Why are you punishing everyone because a few people are somehow abusing your service? There are far better ways of solving this issue.
I am moving to your competitors and taking my business from you as I see many others are as well. I also will be sure to never recommend this service and actively warn people, including the multi-million dollar company I work for, of the poor businesses practices you have publicly displayed.
Good luck.
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