I believe what @Ivarpoiss wants to say is that they would like to prepay, not leave you without payment.
Please note that the need to ask you to opt in is due to Storj having to comply with European laws.
This customer is already prepaying. I was referring to the scenario that would happen if the customer let their prepaid balance run out completely, resulting in an unpaid invoice. It is not reasonable to expect us to not at least freeze the account in that scenario, after the user did not react to warning messages about impending suspension.
Prepayment is not effective if you donât know whether it will suffice due to changes in pricing.
Users have access to the new pricing information and they can check the estimated charges in their account dashboard. The first invoice at the new pricing will not be generated until August for usage during July.
Not a lawyer but if this change really needs to be ânegotiatedâ, instead of a normal notice, then just deleting an account maybe wouldnât be legal either. I maybe wouldnât have minded if it was presented as an actual choice. Not thought about it too much if it was just a notice.
We are not just deleting accounts. There are multiple notifications before and after the July 1 deadline to allow people to still opt in. Accounts will not get deleted until after another 45 day long grace period to give people that missed the first Notifications a chance to still opt in.
And there is even the example:
ohh i get it, some ppl may not event be able to react withing this 45 days and opt in, but they still have sufficient funds lets say for at least 1 year up front to cover eventual storage cost of theirs backups, whats with such scenario?
Storj does not have an offer for them.
It seems to me Storj just does not want to take on long-term risks in this case. These offers by definition would have to be more expensive. You want stable pricing (and apparently good customer communication 
), you pay AWS prices.
They have. They can always send out a 1 month notification and just charge more. Then itâs the users responsibility if they donât respond and cancel. Currently it seems they are trying to forcibly walk back on older binding statements about the price and the time frame of the planned changes. Maybe they have gotten in trouble in the past and hired an AI lawer this time or something. Iâm sure there some actual loopholes and exceptions to do this right. Why not just ask honestly offering all the options.
I donât think this communication to the end user side could have been handled more poorly.
I have been a node operator and a consumer of Storj since 2022.
I get an email last week saying âweâre gonna charge you $50 just to use the service regardless of consumptionâ.
So being an individual with sane financial management skills my storj bill going from âI share 10TB of my Truenas setup to pay for my 4TB of backup a monthâ to âpay us $600 a year to backup 4TB of dataâ I did what anyone would do, I turned off my backup jobs and deleted my buckets because no.
No where in that email was âyouâre paying for your storage with Storj tokens, so this doesnât applyâ and to add insult to injury, a few hours later âoops, my bad people who signed up through the truenas scale partnership arenât affectedâ
So now all my backup jobs are gone (under the threat of a $50 a month fine for keeping them within 7 days of the email) and on top of that I didnât need to do any of that because 1). Iâm paying for my plan with Storj tokens and 2) I signed up when you announced the partnership with truenas scale.
Iâm a happy user of the distributed storage with a lot of redundancy with E2EE enabled by default to protect my data from being included in AI/LLM training datasets (Iâm not sure of a post-quantum encryption algorithm being tested / in place or not though), and wonât complain as long as it just works and lets me sleep at night in peace- which basically is not taken for granted these days experiencing a lot of outages at GitHub etc.
Thatâs the whole point for me. Though I was surprised at first when I got the announcement mail, the option to pay with the token is available, which is a bargain Iâd have to say, so Iâve got it and paid with it, and thatâs it.
SNOs might have other perspectives, but thatâs an experience of me who is a small user since 2020 when Storj was called as Tardigrade.
Hello @trek-e,
Welcome back!
Customers paying their bills with STORJ tokens are not exempt from the new tariffs; they are only exempt from the minimum monthly billing. Therefore, they received standard notifications with links to updated tariffs that indicate this exemption.
As a TrueNAS customer, you didnât receive the first email on June 1, 2026, because TrueNAS customers were supposed to be excluded from the list. However, the second automatic notification didnât include this rule, so you received a second notification about your impending account freeze. Worse, the opt-in/opt-out status wasnât updated to âExcludedâ (even though it should have been), so this opt-in/opt-out status may still have appeared on your dashboard at that time.
This has all been corrected, and weâve sent emails to the affected TrueNAS users. However, we understand your frustration and sincerely apologize for this error.
No idea why did you feel the need to post this strange justification (you probably donât like AI and take any chance you have to bash it, or misunderstand the threat model) but you shall not rely on your currently chosen vendor encryption. You shall implement your own end to end encryption on top of your chosen storage. Becuse itâs not wise to build your infra around peculiarities of a single provider - you will eventually need to move or diversify.
So not sure what are you getting at with this.
I was not trying to justify anything, because I didnât think there was anything to be justified to begin with.
It seems like you weirdly picked such a tiny point because your current (and only left) agenda is to justify your stance against the situation no matter how. You seem to be unable to accept the fact that there are users who are satisfied with it.
Itâs July, the deal was done, and you are the only one who still complains.
You could keep doing it, but I guess many (except poor @Alexey) will just unsubscribe this topic as I will, because there will be nothing productive out of it.
Why have you not moved already? 
3 Important Updates.
- The monthly minimum has been reverted back to $5 effectiv July 1st.
- The decision deadline has been extended to the 30th of July.
- Only EU1 requires a decision. On 31th of July we will freeze EU1 customers that have not opted in. US1 and AP1 donât require a decision. On these 2 satellites we migrated all customers that didnât opt out.
A good Decision in my Point of view.
But why this Changes without thinking about it in Detail?
Its some Kind of âOne day this, the next day thatâ.
Dont get me wrong, so think itâs good now, but itâs hard to plan.
The chain of command was paralyzed for a few weeks because one important person had an accident. Donât worry he has recovered and is back at work.
Beside that I didnât pick up that topic myself. So I am partially at fault as well. I could have fixed the gap in the chain of command and just find out who I need to convice. If I could turn back time I would try that. In that moment I didnât thought about the gap and focused on the implementation first. Once that was done and my coworker recovered we found a solution that should still work even if it comes a bit late.
Okay. But what about all the customers who already packed up and left? Or maybe that was the point, flush out countless small customers that are more hassle than they are worth?
Object Storage: Simplified Pricing still has the $50 minimum, is this not updated or are there multiple plans/tiers/whatever?