This is a very bad criterion to select a storage provider by. Choice between B2 and storj is not really a choice if you look at anything else but price. Price is irrelevant if the provider has proven that data can be corrupted or lost.
And it is bad.. how precisely? It’s an honest response. This is their business and they can do what they please.
You are, however, misreading the message. It’s not “small customers go away”. You understand that $50 minimum fee alone is not sane.
It’s “small customers, please use our token, it needs trading volume, and large customers can’t be arsed to do that”. (That’s my opinion, based on my observations, and not a fact.).
So if I were you — I would just pay with token. The 10% bonus should more than cover any spread. There are no alternatives to storj today in this price segment. Wasabi is constantly 503 and b2 — not a contender, read my earlier post for why. All others are in the race to the bottom and should not be used. So unless you want to shell out for Amazon or Google (or azure — lol) — storj is the only sane choice today for average individual. And that is just looking at raw storage, ignoring the unique value proposition. So yes, we’ll all complain here and then proceed as usual. Storj knows it. We know it.
getting rid of small bank card transactions (they probably cost a minimum fee per transaction, so getting $5/month from someone leaves Storj with much less than $5)
getting rid of small customers where one support ticket costs more than the customer pays in a few months and the small customers usually generate more support tickets.
propping up the token - if not for the token, Storj would probably just have the minimum fee for everyone, but they make the exception so that node operators are happy. Getting paid with the token is probably cheaper for Storj as well.
Forcing the use of the token probably gets rid of most small customers, leaving mainly the node operators. Node operators are likely to know how to use the service and probably generate fewer support tickets than an average small customer.
Certainly not unreasonable – and to what @arrogantrabbit said, certainly within their rights to do whatever they want with their business. The problem is that they held themselves out in the past as a cost-effective solution for “small” customers and now have ripped the carpet out suddenly. I suspect most customers like I will have to start from scratch – because cloud-to-cloud transfers are pricey. Even flexify.io with B2 would cost me $90 or more for my “small” amount of data, and other providers are even worse. So clearly Storj doesn’t want average home users anymore and certainly their right to do so – but that wasn’t the case until now. IMO they should grandfather existing users out of this $50 minimum. Instituting paid support for everyone would of course be reasonable.
For those of us who are infants when it comes to cryptocurrencies, please explain how this works. Let’s say I buy $10 worth of Storj tokens on Coinbase to pay my Storj bill.
How do I transfer that token to Storj?
Am I not at risk of the token decreasing in value before Storj can apply it to my bill? By that I’m asking – is my bill in number of tokens or in the dollar value of those tokens?
Prices go up. They do not typically go up 5X suddenly. That is the issue – for we “small” users, this is an unreasonably huge jump in price in far too short of a time.
Your Storj account is associated with a ETH wallet address. You can send the tokens directly to it from Coinbase. As soon as they arrive Storj looks at the market price in USD… adds a 10% bonus… and adds it as a credit to your account. They don’t sit in your account: you get the cash-equivalent-value immediately,
From the time you buy STORJ on Coinbase to when you’ve sent it as payment can just be a couple minutes. You’re much more likely to gain from the 10% bonus then lose from the market moving in that time.
Thank you for that – that’s excellent info. Hoops to jump through – but maybe that’s the solution here. I’m assuming the exchanges like Coinbase charge some kind of commission that has to be factored in? So this old fogey trying to backup family data in a safe and economical way now has to bite the bullet with crypto. Sigh.
It looks like that but likely will not work with small customers. They will either go to the forum to ask questions (where Storj employees may answer them) or will complain in public spaces that Storj service does not work, even if it’s the customer who is doing something incorrectly. He thinks that the service sucks, it’s a scam and will complain publicly about this.
I guess they did their math and figured out that the $5/month customers do not bring any profit, maybe even loss.
It seems like Storj is not very efficient when it comes to small amounts of data, that is, they have relatively large fixed costs per customer.
Let me elaborate on what’s involved here and how it looks (assuming US)
Customer has money in USD. Storj prices service in USD. Storj has a way to accept said USD and pay 1-3% commission to the credit card provider. Or surcharge the customer, or use ACH for free. Either way, this is a solved problem.
Instead:
Customer has money.
Customer has to create coinbase account, go through KYC.
Customer has to fund coinbase account from their bank (free in US at least, but takes a few days, unless you trust Plaid and/or stripe, which is another layer of nonsense)
Customer obtains their storj ERC20 deposit address from storj portal, and has it handy
Customer buys STORJ tokens at ask price on the market. Coinbase handles complexity and charges about 1% of value for the trouble.
At this point the value is at the mercy of token volatility, hence, having the deposit address handy.
Customer sends the token to their storj account deposit address. This involves a transaction cost and can also vary wildly, depends on ETH gas fee. Coinbase also hides this complexity from you, including the need to have ETH in your account for gas… but it’s still there.
Storj receives tokens and immediately “sells” them, or more likely stashes the tokens into their pile and credits your account the current market value of the tokens sent in USD at the time of deposit. Plus 10%, for your troubles.
Of course that $50 is punitive. But so is this nonsense. And yet, because competition is so much worse – they will get away with this.
It’s the principle “we don’t need to be the best, we need to be better than competition” at work here. I wholeheartedly despise this principle, but this is the world we’ve collectively shaped.
The key here is that this is not a price hike. It’s a message. Price increase goes into storage plan rates and conditions.
Truly appreciate all these in-depth replies from everyone - the community behind a product certainly says a lot.
The credit card processing fee is a very legitimate point. Although in my view, I’ve always felt businesses should absorb that as part of their overhead. But even if they are unwilling to do so, why not simply tack on an extra 3% charge or whatever for customers paying by credit card? Or offer a discount for a direct ACH withdrawal from a bank account?
I can absolutely understand them wanting to reduce their overhead for the little guys like me by passing those costs on. But why make us jump through hoops using crypto?
And with regarding the particular crypto exchange to use - Goggle Gemini seems to think that Kraken will charge me the least. Is there some other reason to prefer Coinbase? Their fees seem to be substantially higher than everyone else.
Becuse this is the goal. Not saving costs. Keeping token alive. Node operators are captive audience and they don’t have a choice, they are compensated in token and absorb volatility. Customers did — so now they effectively don’t. Unless you are big enough customer that your business is more valuable than benefit of helping token stay alive.
That’s why it is a minimum charge and not surcharge.
Obviously ignorant question – but why do they even care about the token? Isn’t revenue in USD or other hard currency what matters? Or are they simply trying to drive up the value of these tokens because they (obviously) hold a boatload of them?
I think many people are looking at this from an emotional perspective rather than a business perspective.
Small customers are important, but if the cost of support, billing, payments, compliance, infrastructure, and account maintenance exceeds the revenue they generate, then those customers are effectively operating at a loss for the company. Growth only matters when it leads to profitability, not when it simply creates more costs.
The retail example actually illustrates this well. When the cost of plastic bags, receipts, and related services increased, stores did not stop serving customers. Instead, they said: either pay the real cost of those services or bring your own bag and avoid the extra charge. Storj is doing something very similar. They are not forcing anyone to leave the platform; they are simply saying that maintaining accounts and providing services has a real cost, and that cost needs to be covered.
Large customers also tend to provide more stable revenue, lower support costs relative to revenue, and more predictable growth. If this change helps Storj become a sustainable and profitable business, it ultimately benefits the entire ecosystem, including token holders and node operators.
In my view, the real issue is not that Storj introduced a minimum fee. The issue is that many people became accustomed to cloud services being sold below their true cost for years, subsidized by investors. At some point, the actual cost of providing the service has to be paid.
This is my understanding: Originally the purpose of tokens was to raise the capital and bootstrap the company. On paper it was never intended to be and never was a share in the company, it’s literaly a utility token to facilitate payments, with official purpose of simplifying international payments, which I don’t buy, because intl payments is a solved problem and paperwork does not disappear if you tunnel value through crypto maket.
Crypto folks will speculate on anything so this was a useful way to extract value from those speculative markets to start the company.
Now token is not needed. But storj cannot drop it cold turkey because of regulatory responsibilities and maybe also because it can still h continued to be used to extract value from speculative markets.
But you may notice storj.io removed mentions of the token, and all token related paraphernalia lives on a separate domain. Why? No idea. If it’s so instrumental to storage?
So I’m also baffled — why not let token die from natural causes? No idea. It seems now it’s a pure distraction and drag on everyone with no benefits in return, and no convincing reason to exist. The official slogan “STORJ token powers distributed cloud storage and AI” is clear as mud — because storage surely does not need a token. Storj whitepaper has multiple provisions for payments including exchange of live goats.
So I also don’t know why does it still exist, and why these life support measures like forcing customers to use via artificial limits are being implemented. Official explanations are not satisfying.
If the token no longer plays an important role in the ecosystem, then the real question becomes: why should customers hold it at all? A token does not need to be mandatory, but it should provide a clear advantage. Otherwise, investors will naturally question its long-term purpose.
It’s a utility token. It’s not meant to be held. It’s not meant to be an investment vehicle. Its value is not tied to success of storj as a company. Indiscriminate crypto bros I alluded to in my previous comment are gamblers, not investors.
No issue with most of your post – yes, a sustainable business must make a profit. But the point that has been made repeatedly in this thread is that the minimum cost is NOT $50 – since they are willing to charge 1/10 of that monthly if paid in a different currency. That makes no sense.
