Important Update: Upcoming Storj Customer Pricing Adjustments and SNO Impact

Product Discussions STORJLINGS
272

@Alexey
@littleskunk

or things can stay the same.

Only change in customers plan: to just give some fixed TB of egress for free.
So its not 7$/TB from first byte.

I want take FEAR out of customers shoulders.
I identify the download price ($7/TB) as a blocking factor.
$7 per TB is high now a days,
when You can download 1TB in 30 minutes with modern home connections.

i just think it should be adjusted to modern conditions.
People view paying for bandwidth as a scam, i know i do, because i pay for access, internet is unlimited for almost all of us, since like a quarter of a century.

So i guess most people has an repulsive reflex, if they see a need to pay for such common thing. And may even view it as a brazen attempt at extortion.

As a SNO, i just want to give people data for free, even without changing anything, so they view Storj as a friend, who does not seek to rip them off for money. And in exchange they will more likely want to store with Us, the one thing that really i am paid for.
Iā€™am paid for keeping their data, and to give access 24/7.
What iā€™m saying is what ever form the solution takes, theres a need to loosen the bandwidth cost on customers in order for them to upload more data.

I even want to create a simple GUI application to help fill SNOs disks. I already did a plan, just waiting for other things to settle down so i can start.. i want to open source it. That app will use only native Storj, and will be cheaper than dropbox for smallest customers, and will not require email, can be just connecting with wallet like Rabby. its already okay with current pricing up to 500 GB of storage, but later above it will lose to competition. If Enough SNOs would opt-in to give some egress for free, my bet is the network can really expand from that, maybe Your Storj Select is growing, but Storj Public is in stagnation on all my nodes, i just want people to discover how great Storj is, actually serve them the best value, that can be free egress up to x1 of stored data, or $3/TB for first 1TB, and later 7$/TB, or whatever better, just lets dare something worthy, so customers want to upload data with us..

273

Sure I can offer $14 per TB with 1x free egress. Just let me know and I will apply that to your account.

There is also a RCS pricing. You can become a storj reseller. We would give you a discount and you can make some money out of that. You get full flexibilty but ofc you might want to make sure you charge enough otherwise this will turn into a loss for you.

274

I donā€™t understand what RCS is, after research it come out to the word Reserve Capacity, then I try to see which company Storj partner with, see Hammerspace. Research a bit about them, then I realize: they could attack us with free egress.

This is of course only theoretical: they register a bunch of accounts, then use the surplus of free egress per account aggregated. To mitigate this, we could introduce a trust system (can be done purely via calculating cost at payment step) via account age or a simple system to detect irregularities.

At the ultimate egress level, it really come down similar to wasabi policy, store X and you get Y free egress, so it might work?

275

apply to my node that iā€™m giving egress for free from now on, but customers using my node has to pay less too 12DGC5S6UStVVHudFEJ7KLM5wXCSwdmgtem3dDGuiZSi74KdpH6

276

If it was done right, I would at least think about it. Maybe not free but even at a reduced rate.
A program that offers a certain amount of free space for e.g. science, research or education like Open Data on AWS or data for really good established web projects e.g. Wikipedia or even observatory data like Solutions by industry - #30 by jammerdan that would be even great marketing.

Of course all that would depend on enough SNOs to join if Storj would setup specific satellites for such use cases.

I think we had that:
Storj Pricing | Seamlessly scale on the cloud built for media production

Screenshot2026-07-25054946
Screenshot2026-07-250549461867Ɨ816 212 KB

Thatā€™s exactly the difference between a plan with free egress and one without. It seems the success was limited and Storj decided to switch back.

277

The ā€œfreeā€ egress was to include 1x egress equal your monthly storage (stored the entire month). This can be done right now too, like suggested by @littleskunk

But basically it means, that you will pay $7 for storage of 1TB for a month and $7 for egress of 1TB (if you stored 1TB the entire month and downloaded exactly 1TB).
Why this is important difference?
Because you can upload 0.5TB and upload 0.5TB half month later, the resulted monthly storage will be 0.5TB * 1 + 0.5TB * 15/30 = 0.75TB-mo, despite the fact the snapshot will show 1TB of occupied space, however, the second 0.5TB is stored only half a month. So you will get only 0.75TB of free egress, as a result. It will produce exactly the same invoice as the current Standard pricing.
But if you donā€™t have downloads, then in Standard you will pay only 0.75TB * $7 = $5,25 instead of 0.75TB * $14 = $10,5

278

Oh no now I have to explain it^^

RCS is a special partner pricing. The idea is that we charge the partner a discounted rate and the partner can charge the standard pricing to his end users. The discount is his profit.

We have whitelabel statellite UI. Lets take your local supermarkt brand that most likely has nothing to do with cloud storage. Now imagin their logo and colors on a satellite UI. Plus some config flexibility like enabling or disabling versioning and objectlock. But for the most part same fuctionality. (Currently invoicing needs to be handled by the partner. In the long run we might have to implement some kind of whitelabel invoicing)

To my knowledge we donā€™t charge the partner for egress but the expectation is that the parter charges it to the end user. I raised the concern that this could get abused but the reality is a 1x egress partner is kind of impossible. With standard use pattern it will be fine and if a partner happens to exceed our estimations we can still talk to them and increase the pricing. To me it sounds like an experiment. We have a partner that believes he can get high egress customers. Our data is telling us that these end users overestimate their egress and underestimate their used space. But lets find a pricing that works for both sides, onboard the partner and his customers, keep an eye on the numbers and adjust down the line depending on the real usage pattern.

There is also some kind of reservation. The smallest would start at 50TB and then it switches to 100TB increments. If the parther has like 1.01PB we would charge him 1.1PB. The discount rate makes up for that. What I donā€™t know is if this happens automatic on invoice generation or in advance doing contract negotiation. I believe it has to be done in advance? But what happens if the partner is exceeding the reservation? These questions are on my todo list. First few RCS partners are starting off. I do see a fast increase in used space. I am sure the bigger they grow the better the RCS pricing gets.