Looking back at my previous calculations here:
(Update Proposal for Storage Node Operators - #446 by IsThisOn)
I think it is time for an update of that calculation.
From a customer’s point of view, they pay 4$/TB storage and 7$/TB download. It doesn’t matter if they download from S3, HTTP or any other edge server or use the native STORJ uplink.
From the STORJ perspective, they pay the nodes 1.5$/TB and need to pay 2.7 nodes. That is a total of 4$/TB they pay for storage and 2$/TB egress. What we don’t know is how much they pay per TB traffic for edge services. We only know how much they pay for edge services in total. 2.7M in Q4 2022 or in other words, more than twice of what they pay to nodes! I assume their costs are roughly the same as the rest of the industry so I will use 5$/TB for traffic. Maybe someone from STORJ can chime in on that.
From a node perspective, we get 1.5$/TB for STORAGE and 2$/TB egress.
What does that mean in reality?
Use case 1: a customer uploads 1TB, stores that for one month, and then download that again over a native integration. In that case, the client pays 11$ (4$ storage plus 7$ download) to STORJ. STORJ pays 6$ (2$ egress + 4$ storage) to nodes. This gives STORJ a profit of 5$
Use case 2: a customer uploads 1TB, stores that for one month, and then download that again over S3. In that case, the client pays 11$ (4$ storage plus 7$ download) to STORJ. STORJ pays 6$ (2$ egress + 4$ storage) to nodes plus 5$ to run the S3 gateway. This is a net zero.
The new economic model finally makes kind of sense.
Too bad that the current customer pricing is not competitive and needs to go down. Which will change that calculation once again.