Hello SuperBoy (I watched your old Blender tutorials on Youtube 
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I also give my two pences, this is actually a suggestion. We’re all different individuals with different objectives and motivations for being a node. The first one, for a lot of us, is obviously the benefit taken in token, but for the others, it could be a hobby for enthusiast nerds, and also for “archiving” reason ultimately. One of my motivations to be in your network is participating to our Internet of Tomorrow: decentralized, open-source mainly, secure, resilient against climatic disasters and wars, and a bit more independant and free than before. Thus, because not every S.N.O. is focused on the money-part, I suggest something possible for reducing costs (at least SNO side) and develop more plans and use-cases on Tardigrade for a larger target.
Make like three options that you can check or not in the GUI Dashboard or in the config file:
- The Top-Notch premium current service with same (or almost) prices for storage and egress.
- An option for archiving/storage for a personal use (with a lower SLA): in that case, we pay only a fraction of the storage and egress currently earned by the current plan. Tardigrade-side, you align your prices to be competitive with the others on the market for a personal use/storage, with limitations in redondancy or uptime if necessary (in that case, we could even imagine S.N.O. not filling the high demanding conditions of the SLA for the current service, with higher downtime, slower connection around the entire world, and overally slower node to be used for these customers, instead of disqualification (based on a lower SLA to define). So, these nodes could still join and participate to the network but satellitte will exclude them from the first plan and disqualification still apply if they fall below the maximum defined downtime for this plan.
- The “Free” plan; for non-profit, humanitarian organizations, and Internet archives team: in this plan, the SNO give way their storage for free, like a donation/contribution for a common cause, like COVID-19. Tardigrade-side, it could be not free but at minimal non-profit price to maintain the infrastructure (or maybe also free and absorbed by the other plans, or even deducted from the SNO held balance if they check and accept that option ?). With this kind of option, we could also join causes like Internet Archive (or projects like the Archive Team: archiveteam.org).
For each option, the SNO could enable/disable and assign storage (by percentage of total, or more precisely by units, a bit like the Humble Bundles where you can select a portion for the developper, and for non-profits). Tardigrade-side, you assign also priorities on the traffic for maintain the same quality of service for the current plan : 1 > 2 > 3.