A friend directed me to this site and I didn’t know that it required payment. Missed that or something obviously, so I just want to get the files off the site/server/cloud and close my account but Storj keeps asking for $ to do so.
How can I download my files? I looked at the payment possibility, but could not figure out what it would even cost. $10 on a credit card and then what?
Cost is $0.004/GB/month to store (plus small segment fee) and $0.007/GB to egress. It’s on the front page, pretty easy to find.
You trial account has been likely frozen. You can upgrade to pro by adding a payment method.
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Yes I’d found the way to pay, but it’s unclear what my total would be, if my Thai CC would be accepted, and what is needed to cancel the account so I don’t have recurring charges on my card till the end of time. 
Hello @Eric,
Welcome to the forum!
You may check it on the Billing page, there is estimation how much it would cost. You may also check the latest invoice.
Or calculate manually using the pricing:
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So, assuming my horrid math skills are correct, my 85GB that are stored here would cost 85GB x .004 = .34 to be able to download it?
The storing is cost you $0.004/GB*mo. But the egress is $0.007/GB. I do not know, how much segments you have used, but let’s assume that you used a 5MiB chunk size.
So, the rough math is:
85GB * $0.004/GB*mo * 5/31 (days of mo) + 85GB * 39/29 (overhead on a long tail cancelation, there could be more, if your software would use retries) * $0.007/GB + (85GB / 5MiB) * $0.0000088/segment*mo * 5/31 (days of mo) = $0.87802236181477
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You will find out if your card is accepted when you try to add it. Once you have done so, just delete all buckets and access grants and the invoice for this current month will be the last one you will receive, as if there is no more usage on the account, there is nothing to charge you for. @arrogantrabbit and @Alexey already explained to you how you can estimate how much you might get charged, depending on how many GB you have stored on the network and how many GB you want to download. Once you have regained access to the account by adding a payment method, you could also see your estimated charges in your billing page. Unless you have stored a great amount of data, most likely the charges will be neglegible. Without knowing the email on your account I can´t give you a more exact estimate.
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Thank you for that heunland.
The data I uploaded to Storj, all of which are photos, is not backed up anywhere locally on any drive I have. I wanted to use Storj for “cold storage” just in case past clients needed copies of their photos which on rare occasions happens. Otherwise these photos have little to no value to me personally, but being a nice guy I want to keep these copies for the clients somewhere.
So I may just keep the photos on Storj for now.
The only thing that worries me slightly is the wording in the popup when I click to upgrade.
“By upgrading your trial will end immediately”
Seems it already has, but I just want to make sure my one project, which is the 85GB backup of these aforementioned photos, is safe and won’t disappear.
Heunland, if I can send you my email to check on my account, let me know how to do that.
The meaning of this is that if you upgrade to Pro while your trial is still running, the remaining days will be canceled. So upgrading will take effect immediately and not just after the trial period has ended.
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Thank you jammerdan!
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I agree that the wording could be improved. And when the trial has already ended, such a banner seems to be obsolete.
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True, but for most perhaps not that bad. I’m just one of those who doesn’t want to end up paying much and in proceeding a tiny bit further, I don’t see any options for cancellation. Checked the TOS and the word cancel is not in there.
Seeing “By saving your card information, you allow Storj to charge your card for future payments in accordance with the terms of service.” sounds permanent.
It’s exist actually, however, right now it’s a manual process, which requires to file a support request.
We would process it and your account would be deleted if you do not want to use a Storj network anymore.
We are working on of the self-service, but it’s not released yet (you can try it on the QA Satellite though: Please join our public test network).
However if your account is frozen already, you can do nothing - it would be deleted automatically (but no ETA and no notification would be sent).
I would recommend using virtual debit card, one-time use card, or however your bank call it, where once payment is made and you downloaded your data, cancel the virtual card and no further payments can be made. I use it extensively, for unknown eshops and services I want only one payment make, and then card is blocked and no need to care about further unwanted payments.
Or send some storj coins to the account. You don’t need to actively cancel the account or delete the data, it will do itself.
I’m clearly not sure that our payment provider can accept the virtual card though.
It does, I used it. They will actually not even know the card is virtual:
the card is in fact not existing any longer, and until you have enough Token it works fine.
To clarify, upgrading to Pro Account will not result in any files in existing buckets from the free trial to be lost. All your data will be preserved. @jammerdan gave a correct explanation regarding that usage will start getting charged from the time you upgrade if your free trial maximum run time had not expired yet. This would be irrelevant if your account was already frozen.
When you add a payment method, you will regain access to your previously uploaded files and will only be charged for actual usage. So there is no need for using virtual debit cards as a measure to prevent the card to be charged in the future, as you can just delete all your files yourself at any time and thus stop usage charges from accruing, so you will only get a final invoice for the usage up to the time you deleted all your data and then will not have any payments due after that even if you never requested the account to be deleted as described by @Alexey
Your payment method will not get charged in the future unless there was actual usage for storage, egress or segment fees during a billing period. So unless you later upload new files again, no charges will get applied to your payment method.
On the other hand, for customers who are paranoid about getting charged forever which as described above is not a realistic scenario for an unused account with only empty buckets, so they use such measures aa virtual cards that expire or have no funds in them at time of invoicing, they will get their accounts frozen if we cannot charge for usage they did accrue if they just left no longer needed files sit there without deleting them.
Of course any files remaining in an inactive account would result in still generating storage charges, so the customer should delete all those files, buckets and access grants as soon as possible to minimize the amount owed on the final invoice when they decide they no longer want to use our service and want the account to be deleted.
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Exactly what I needed to find out @heunland thank you!
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You could mark Heunland’s reply as solution 
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