At Storj, we continually strive to enhance our platform to serve our customers better. We will be making an update to our account structure that will take effect starting in April.
What’s Changing?
Storj is discontinuing the “Free Tier,” which historically was offered to allow users to try Storj. Current users of the Free Tier have from now until March 31 to upgrade to a Pro Account to continue using Storj. For users who already have a Pro Account, they will no longer receive the Free Tier coupon. We are encouraging users who do not want to upgrade to a Pro Account to migrate any data off Storj before their accounts are frozen.
How Will This Affect SNOs?
Storj will be removing the Free Tier data from the network (as well as some test data) at a pace roughly aligned with the increase in paid data. This means that for several months, for the overall network, we anticipate that the total amount of data should remain relatively constant and SNO payouts should stay fairly stable. However, individual nodes may see fluctuations in their earnings as data is removed and space is made available for new data to be stored on those nodes.
What Do You Need to Do?
There is no action required on the part of the SNOs for this transition.
Looking Ahead
We’re excited about the future and committed to providing our users with the best possible experience. We are grateful for the partnership of the SNO community as we undergo this transition.
Without the Free Tier coupon: I don’t imagine the loss of 25GB will hurt much: but won’t many more people be hit with segment fees? To me the offset of those first 10k segments was the most important part of the coupon.
Oh this is a shame, appreciate the current offer was very generous and clearly might off been abused by some…
However, I hope it’s replaced with some form of 30 day free trial or 1GB allocation, as developers really like to try new services out before recommending them…
Without any free trial, and a pay wall to the service, you are effectively asking developers to pay before they try, and that could be a barrier to usage - maybe some better wording on the website to encourage them to request a free trial or talk with Storj would be better to KYC, then completely shutting this down ? maybe also keeping the free trials out of S3 without some form of usage charge…
On the delete of data, I would prefer a quicker delete over a shorter period, maybe 30 days - as we know the Garbage Collection isn’t Realtime, and it will take several passes to remove these pieces maybe even more…having months of slow deletes doesn’t benefit the filesystem, fragmentation is going to be horrible as new files are written in the gaps for full nodes… But I’m sure other SNO’s would sooner keep the data for as long as possible, guess you can’t please eveyone
I’ve just received one of the scammier looking email I had ever seen:
Formatting is all off – where are margins? Why is the text blue?
“Dear Storj User”? Why is User capitalized? Why use generic “Storj User” in the first place when you clearly know my name?
“our help desk” link is incomprehensible and points to a obscure third party link with crazy metadata and redirects. Why do you need to have tracking in the list to help desk? Why is this not implemented on your domain? How can I get to your Helpdesk if I block all third party trackers on my network?
Unless this is someone impersonating storj – I expected way more from storj marketing. It’s quite disappointing.
What does it mean?
For example i’m willing to topup some STORJ for my account, for that small amout of MB i store there just to prevail them. Not sure i will be able to “upgrade to a Pro Account” not able to add any credit card, or any KYC, im able only to send some STORJ for cost of hosting of my just few MB im keeping. I uploaded some 100MB maybe, to just store it - with intention in mind:
“Its worlds safest place!
i upload files and they are here for ever!
I can turn back whenever i want and get my files from STORJ! Yaaaay!”
just make sure You will send me an email before any deletion, okay?
And make sure i can fund the account with tokens, okay?
I will send like 10 STORJ to just keep my 100MB for like 8 years!
And after that 8 years i hope You will send me an email if the funds will end and You need new? Okay?
Or just keep the free storage up to some 1GB storage free of charge for emails that are also registered for nodes, yea?
So SNOs only can have some free 1GB at least of storage, and 1GB download per month, how about that?
If you add $10 (USD) worth of STORJ to your account then you will be upgraded to a “Pro Account” and you shouldn’t have any issue. When your account runs out of funds we will send you an email indicating that your invoice is unpaid and giving you an opportunity to top off your account.
It’s not 30 PB ;). We are planning a more detailed announcement in the future that will indicate the state of Paid vs Free data on the network, so I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag so to speak, but stay tuned.
Are you aware that your free storage offer in the form of 25GB and your last year promotion of 150GB looks a bit like a scum right now, yes or no?
I am smiling a little bit of course, anyway, how serious are you guys, because to be honest, it does not look serious at all.
To be more serious, finally, because, this 150GB last year promotion without any KYC looked so questionable from the very start. I cant recall anybody doing that at this level of free storage without any constraints at all. Especially that your costs in this case were perpetual.
Lets hope that at least you got some market depth insight and some info about the customer base.
Hey @Bryanm, it’s unfortunate to see the free tier go away, but understandable. However, I do have a question. Well, 2 actually. I always intended to just pay for my small time use, but ever since the free tier was available, I didn’t have to pay because the coupon covered it. I still have a balance on my account though… or at least, I should have, but it’s not displayed anywhere anymore. I can see the original transaction, but my token balance says $0. This balance was added back in 2020, using the old method.
So, here are my questions:
What happened to my token balance? Is this a bug?
How can I upgrade to pro without unnecessarily having to deposit more tokens?
I also didn’t receive the email mentioned in this topic. But maybe it’s still rolling out.
Yeah, I get that, but I don’t want to add a credit card and there should be enough reserves on my account already to pay for my usage for years.
Also, if I ever want to add more, I would just pick one or more of my bigger nodes and change the payout address to the smart deposit address for a month, grabbing the 10% bonus. Seems pretty worth it to me.
