Future will tell us. But there must a reason why all the big players still have some offers for ‘freeloaders’.
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big players have calculated a long time ago that freeloaders bring more new paying customers
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Yeah, big players ran out of large consumers and have to deal with the plankton to maintain the illusion of growth.
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I currently have 6.08TB stores out of 14TB allocated on a external 16TB drive. It’s running on a rpi 4 8GB via USB 3.0 and external power. My rpi’s OS is on an external SSD via USB 3.0 as well. My electricity cost is $0.23kWh, it costs me $0.86 for the rpi 4 and $1.32 for the HDD so $2.18 per month. These are also the highest cost values in my log so cost has been lower in past months. My node is 4 months and 11 days old.
As for profitability, my node now earns more than it costs to run due to the low cost of the setup and the held amount reduction from month 4.
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6 TB in 4 month? Hard to believe… What location is this?
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USA close to the edge of Gorgia. A lot of data has been deleted over the life of the node. My current projected time to fill the drive (assuming no deleted data and current rate of data gained in the current month) is 5 months and 10 days. This was 3 months but sadly data gain has dropped a bit this month. So far this month I have gained 575GB of data minus about 135GB of deleted data so 440GB.
My first node is now 3 years old. The 16 TB disk was full not so long ago but now it is back to 11 TB. Total earning is $610, hold back $6. So it was possible to ROI. But payment for egress was much higher for most of the lifetime of this node.
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3 years old with a nice return! I only have the 1 node but I do have another 16TB drive on standby once this one is full and 2x 8TB SMR drives as well but they probably wouldn’t be as affective at winning data races. I can only assume what my payout would be after it’s full with no held amount but it’s got a long way to go before that.
All my data comes from a script I wrote that gives me updates each hour (more data than I provided as well), smart plugs for the energy cost (might integrate that into the script at some point), and uptimerobot for down detection. I am working on getting a UPS for it and the router/modem as power outages can happen often depending on the time of year.
Why this thing remind me the coffee-machine?
Sorry.
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Unpaid accounts do not help to survive, you know. They only consume. You wouldn’t run the node for a total free, right? Especially, if it’s technically not free for you (you do not heard us and setup the hardware exclusively for Storj).
Small SNOs are still needed, we want to be decentralized as much as possible. So 10 small SNOs in 10 physically different places are better than 1 big in the one physical location the same total size (sorry big SNOs, especially if that one host a big server with all nodes on the same pool).
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You are completely and totally wrong. Unfortunately most of big customers are uses S3. They discovered later that using a native MUCH faster, but initially - they was attracted by a simple transition due to usage of S3 protocol.
So we have customers who uses S3 (traditional object storage usage) and who uses native (usually a video streaming, CDN and software/snapshots distribution, but in the last case they uses 50/50 or maybe 80/20 between native and S3).
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I expected to see just the result of executing the simple script from the operators and see the netto (like this netto 0,84$/TB; gross 1,19$/TB), instead there were conversations on abstract topics. It’s a pity.
hey @IsThisOn, the s3 protocol is an industry standard in the object storage world. Why would a customer make code changes in their applications or stack to integrate with Storj instead of Storj just supporting the industry standard s3 protocol? the support Storj has for the s3 protocol is actually one of the main drivers of customer growth and usage on the network and product.
There are other cloud providers they could choose over us that would be less effort on their part. Companies are not willing to spend engineering time and effort integrating with a specific cloud storage protocols they use s3 and they expect the all of the cloud providers to also support the s3 protocol and they also expect that from the different tools they use in their stack.
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But they help to grow and to become a brand. Yes it is like burning money but it seems to be the way to grow in this business.
Hey @pangolin this was also our original assumption and sentiment when launched the product a few years ago with the free tier. Unfortunately this has proven to not be true. We have learned different ways to grow usage with the product that is much more effective than the free tier we previously offered our customers.
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How is it possible? 1$ for customer must mean about less than 0.4$ for node? At that price I’m out.
I’m afraid this won’t work, as far as I know, Storj does have geo-awareness (I need someone to correct me), hot region where like US and Euro, customer near that region will get faster download speed, that will attract more customer then attract more nodes. Region without bandwidth cannot survive with solely on 1$ per TB. And in the end, distributed storage cannot be achieve?
But I do share worry about S3 stuff, it like chicken and egg problem, Storj need more partner to support it protocol, but in order for that to happen Storj must be a force to be reckon with first…
Is it the new forum logo?
And perhaps start with iXSystems. I’m still baffled IX-storj “integration” on TrueNAS uses S3. They literally copied and renamed the S3 remote with predefined endpoint. And yet, the underlying rclone supports native.
I can see that some customers may prefer s3, as not everyone has 10Gbps upstream connection, but at least provide a choice, and make native integration default.
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Isn’t that the best move? Testing the water to see if attract enough customer, when the number is right, allocating resource to support native that platform (that is if the platform don’t support Storj first). I believe investing engineer resource here first would likely be a lost.
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Yes it seems silly. Of course I understand the marketing value of S3 that it is easy for anybody on Amazon/Wasabi/Backblaze to switch.
But it misses out on the fundamental advantages of Storj DCS and costs Storj a lot of money because they have to pay double in bandwidth and everything.
It would require incentives for customers and projects if they don’t use S3 and go for native.
If nothing else helps, Storj could provide coding of the integration maybe for free or at a discounted rate. That way they would save on S3 cost longterm and make customers and SNOs more happy. It would be a tradeoff, investment vs. ongoing costs.
If they would additinally make longterm contracts with such customers where they helped to build the native integration, then they could make sure that it pays off over the term of the contract.
Also, why not ask them?
Did they ask the thousands of free users, why they did not become paying customers or what features they are missing? I don’t know but I hope they did. I think that could have provided some interesting answers before removing the free tier.
But also already paying customers to ask what is important for them. When you run a business you need to find out for not to not waste resources on features that customers don’t need and don’t even use. (Hint: Community Satellites. For me as today a total waste of time and developer resources)
So what’s really important for customers today? Speed? Decentralization? Encryption? Or price, S3-compatibility, Native languages, Geo-fencing and whatever…?
For me it seems that decentralization and encryption might not be selling that well. Given the fact that the S3 implementation is not really decentralized and encryption happens server side or that customers will be able to choose to have Storj manage their passphrases in the future.
Also payment options. I was a bit surprised Storj has asked us about what payment options to offer for their customers. Maybe better ask the customers. Even better ask the ones who did not become customers because obviously paying customer have come to terms with the payment options offered.
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