The strategy did not work because it seems it was a strategy without a strategic approach. To implement a successful referral strategy there needs to be a tracking and there needs to be a personal reward for the referrer. Even the referred user could receive a little welcome bonus so everybody is happy. This could be anything from swag or discount on swag, bonuses or discounts from a variety of Storj partners or marketing partners.
I have never seen that Storj introduced anything like that.
Such a system should have started from the beginning, as referrals are a strong marketing mechanism. It could have been introduced when the free tier was removed (something like: Want to keep your free tier? Refer paying customers!) and could again be used with introduction of the minimum fee as a way users can waive the fee if they refer paying customers.
Such a system could even be used to reward users for basically anything else that helps the product or the company, like users could be rewarded for great tutorials, reviews, youtube videos and much more. Basically anything that can be tracked.
We know that some Storj competitors do exactly this, by rewarding users with additional free space for example for completing tasks like social sharing or for referrals.
It would be a great feature for SNO to set for the nodes a amount of Storj to send to address A and the rest on address B. So address A can be the Storj DCS account
May be it will be better that, storj take needed amount for payment and all over transfer to you account if something left. less transactions, less spendings for all.
If the additional info about the benefits of paying with token prevents users from closing their accounts, I think it should be improved. From a marketing perspective in my opinions it should display prominently that the minimum fee can be avoided and how without the users having to click any links. Also it should at least mention that there are additional benefits if paying with token and if they want to learn more about it, then they should click the link.
I think the ability to pay with a token to avoid the minimum usage fee was introduced for users of this forum who are loyal to Storj from the very beginning. In any case, such clients are not very profitable for them, but Storj want to show that they have not forgotten their contribution.
I really don’t like the change happening here. Some ideas, one by one:
Price has set by your people, and if you think it’s not fair, and can’t cover the cost, please increase them to represent the cost, fairly, not introducing random fees – that’s one kind of exploit on hobbyist. Azure/Backblaze do not charge me for “minimum usage fee”
(a). If there is a satellites/gateway cost, add them proportionally to the usage fee (or I think it’s partially included inside the internet fees? Storj export fee is already higher then Backblaze and cloudflare (If you don’t export data more then 3.3* as much as your storage).) People use more, pay more, useless, pay less. (If someone host a website, keep calling api, but use little data, then introduce a api calling fee)
(b). For credit card processing fees: I am not against front deposit with $10 or $20 dollars as credit, to reduce the credit card cost on backend (even pay for the credit card cost).
Storj price is already higher then backblaze in my use case (save ~500G, download ~50G). But since it’s a small difference, I can hold it and use it as a support as P2P storage future donation. But If Storj start to introduce minim fee, Then I might have to switch (I know many people have expressed similar ideas)
This is not an extra charge, it is more like rounding up to the minimum charge if you have usage greater than zero but less than the minimum charge. If you do not use the service (usage shows as zero on the billing page) or use more than the minimum charge or pay with STORJ tokens, it will not apply.
Lots of places have a minimum price or some kind of minimum purchase price or something like that to compensate for dealing with the customer at all.
A customer with 1GB of data stored (and no egress) does not bring Storj any profit. Even if, let’s say, the nodes do not need to be paid for storing that 1GB, the payment from such custmer is so tiny it is not worth writing him an invoice.
The way to avoid that is to either streamline the entire system to make it profitable serving 199k customers with 1GB each (which is difficult and may nt be worth it for the total amount from those customers) or have some kind of minimum purchase. Storj went this way - yu have to pay $5/month, but you can atore 1.5TB or whatever for that money, just that if you store less, you get charged for the 1.5TB anyway.
Cellphone providers, at least in my country, do this all the time - you pay some monthly fee, but for that you get x minutes and y SMS messages, if you go over that limit, you pay more, if you don’t use your phone at all, you still pay the minimum. Pre-paid plans (last time I used them) do nof officially have a monthly fee, but you need to add money to them every so often, even if you do not use it.
