I agree there will always be abuses. But maybe then implement multiple checks when account is created. Not just email but telephone number with security code.
also limited ammount of accounts created. This is actually great marketing idea.
open free registration for 100000 users get it on x, fb insta and websites once 100000 is filled lets se how network handles then network can be expanded again and again in controlled way.
maybe even free account with trial account can coexist when limit of free accounts is reached
We do have paying customers that pick us for privacy reasons. The moment we force them to put down a phone number they might go elsewhere. And some of these customers pay a lot. So no lets not break something that works.
So let the abuse people grep them as quickly as possible? And the potential paying customers will be mad because they get left behind?
With 10GB each that would be a 1 PB free storage. For fun lets say we push that down to the storage nodes. Are you all willing to give away 1 PB for free? I donât know how many active nodes we currently have. I would guess we are talking about 5 TB free storage per node. Are you still saying yes as a node operator? I want to store 5 TB with no payment? If no than lets not try to convince storj to pay you for free storage. We all know who is going to grep these 100K accounts first just to boost payout by 5 TBâŚ
Sure that might work. But lets flip that for a moment. Whats wrong with the current free trial? My feeling is the current free trial works great. It gives customers a fair chance to test the product. (Maybe later I can try to run some numbers to verify that claim)
Just a random feeling: recently encounter maxmind, they lock your account after a few years of inactivity (and require customer support to unlock, canât do it on my own via a challenge). Iâve seen some services do that.
What I really want is a place to belongs, donât lock me out of my account (if for some reason you feel the need to do that, let have a self service to unlock myself - like captcha).
A permanent small account like 1 or 2GB (even with 7 days data delete) can do a lot of thing, a rolling backup, a place where I could visit after a few years and decide to engage with the service again..
once you enter credit card number there is no more privacy so it is basically the same as phone number, and I am betting you that 90% would rather leave telephone number for trial/free account then credit card number. Also how does that change anything for privacy users. They can use their account as they used it before they donât need to enter telephone number. They chose paid account and for privacy concern topped account with sorj token. this method is only for free account to prevent abuse. You can create paid account without it in process of creation. Will need to adjust account creating process but i donât see a big deal to retention to create completely private account those are not mutually excluding.
I would be more then happy to give away that storage for free because it allignes on a view what this network should be in my opinion. if we want to grow network there should be some sacrifices.
Storj je beautiful project and I loved it since 2018 I first discovered it and i would like it to grow more.
in order to grow more it should be easy to use, for me personally current state on first glance is so intimidating that I donât even want to click create free trial.
Oh for sure these customers will not use credit card payment. They pay with STORJ token.
Can you explain that a bit more in details? Currently you can create a free trial account very easy. We donât even ask for a credit card up front. Just try it out for free and if you like it you can keep the account by upgrading to a pro account. If you donât like it we will delete the account for you. Very easy.
Your proposal seems to be to make it harder to create a free account but remove the time limit. That sounds more like more abuse. There is nothing in it that would simplify the process for a regular paying customer. Your proposal is to extend free storage and remove the requirement to upgrade to pro account. Just stay on free forever. That is not going to work.
When you open pricing page as a retail user you are presented with three plans.
One is Free trial, second is Standard and last one Advanced.
At first you will immediately dismiss advanced. On standard you will scratch your head, why I pay storage and egress that is 7$ and egress additional 7$ that is 14$ a month, yeah that is way more expensive then competition. Why there is not lower plan I might just need 1TB to store family photos this is way more expensive that I thought. Will I be billed 7$ or 14$ of 20$ at the month end, I might use all egress.
And there is then last free plan, it is 30 day account, how much I can store? Is that 7TB? Is that unlimited? Is that less then 7TB? What is going on with egress, they are charging egress on paid accounts what is limit on free account can I download too much in 30 day period will I get billed for it in next month if I want to go to paid plan, will I get account blocked for it!?
Nah ill just go to âgeneric drive provider" they say it is 2$ a month for 200gb it is much simpler.
This above is just train of thought that come thru my mind when I see pricing page of storj, not actual questions I want an answer from you.
There is more questions reading pricing plan then answers. Thatâs why I said it is intimidating and I am confidant a lot of potential users have same thought as I.
It is simply a lot straight forward on competition side.
i think over course of 7 years on this forum i saw every discussion, and i think i remember some admission that Storj do check bandwidth speeds. Thats one layer, for sure would filter some âcluelessâ cheaters. For âwiseâ cheaters i remember discussion about how to validate âIF node is throttling bandwidth for egress?â too. i think the conclusion was something like âmystery shopperâ, so every node could check that, so all very doable solutions. Beside that, remember even if malicious node will throttle egress, the majority of nodes are not malicious, and willing to support the network. Although Storj design seems to be perfect for mitigate that, by its many parallel connection it makes customers experience unaffected.
i just kindly showing You that others have better offer, Storj could easily keep up and surpass any offer by unique power of its node operators, that are capable of so much more, so much more to give to the customers, that Storj seems to just waste.
Storj is wasting our potential right now.
And that hurts me, i could give clients much more, and receive more from them
Having been in a position of selecting vendors for two small companies, anything that time-limits my decision is put at the end of my list. This is because I never know how soon I can get my team to actually test a solution. Like, maybe suddenly weâll get a new potential contract, where we have to drop everything and run for it. I think you had a taste of this kind of workâŚ
If you allow re-starting the trial (starting again with empty content) after one expires, that would be enough, and, I guess would be sort-of equivalent to automatically deleting data on trial accounts with the added effort of clicking a buttonâgood thing for Storj to track interest. Even easy to implement, just enforce expiration on each upload. Then, even a week or two of persistence could be enough.
From experience, usually you cannot register a new trial account for the same identity (email/credit card/whatnot). You you need to frame it explicitly using different language for people to understand this. Itâs easier to write ârestartable trialâ than âyou can register for a trial account more than once, but only after the previous one expiresâ.
We are locking data for non-payment and when the trial is expired (here you can still use a self-service either by paying the past due invoices or by adding a valid payment method with enough funds), then after a while we lock the account (you will receive several emails before that happen). If the account is not contacted us within a short interval after - it will be deleted completely.
No, we donât do this, we metering used bandwidth, thatâs all. But there is a score system for the node - how often it wins uploads or downloads, which is mean that it is faster than competitors. So this node will be suggested more often to the customers than others.
This score could be modified to prefer egress over ingress, then it might help to dismiss nodes which limiting their egress bandwidth, but it might work only if most nodes will have the altruistic behavior. Otherwise it will cause a degradation of egress for the customer.
I have one concern though - we likely paying for egress from gateway-mt, so this expense will not be covered by customersâ downloads. This might be mitigated by waiving egress fee if they use a native integration and charge them if they use a gateway-mt.
You can. Simply because weâre generous and care about our clients, we donât immediately delete frozen accounts, allowing those who are forgetful (or have had health issues) to regain access by paying their bills. Until now, this periodic job worked the same for trial accounts and non-paying accounts. Perhaps it is time to separate them and we are working on it. So earlier you was unable to register, because your previous account was in a pending deletion queue (~15-30 days) before it becomes deleted (and yes, we paying to SNOs for that from our pocket, because the customer doesnât pay).
Iâm not talking about Storj. Iâm talking about IT services in general. I have no idea whether this is possible or not, and I wouldnât assume this is possible unless you had this in large red letters across the main page.
If anything, Storj allowing to do so is highly unusual and unexpected.
After some thought, I came to the conclusion that the free trial period should not be shortened, because otherwise it will make it easier to re-create the same account immediately after the trial period ends and will definitely be exploited.
This is exactly reason why I said I am intimidated for creating trial account, and why most people avoid this kind of trial. There are not alot of people willing to create account when there is even slight possibility for past due invoice, they just simple go to other provider and experiment there.
Storj is beautiful tech but way under utilized and underestimated.
I will repeat, I have no problem storing trial data for free even egress, there could be also option for node operators to accept or decline free user accounts data.
Just throwing ideas, we could do staking on nodes so operators can vote do they want changes in this matter or not.
Create a separate post in Node Operators but using the inline âBuild pollâ feature in the editor composer, which allows you to have more than one option.
On a first glance that sounds like a good idea but there is one problem. Right now the node selection is designed as a load balancer. There are research papers on this method. Measure performance, compare of 2, use the one that has better numbers. The beauty of this method is that it doesnât overload nodes. It dials in on the perfect load for every node. It is nice and stable exactly the way the research paper describe it.
If we would now use the download score we get a load balancer that doesnât go by upload performane anymore. Think about it this way. You give that load balancer an additional list of nodes you believe should be fast. The load balancer will give them more uploads but it has no chance to notice if the node gets overloaded because your list is lacking behind a few hours. The download event that might reveal that the node is now overloaded will happen hours later. Sure the upload performance will get a direct hit but the load balancer is now forced to compare a node with bad upload performance but 100% download score because there was no download yet and a node with good upload performance but bad download score. The result would be a less potent load balancer and as a consequence slower overall uploads.
