the year is 2024, the price of BW and storage become more and more cheaper.
Do Storj plan to reduce the prices? idrive has 0.004$ with no request coast or bw coast, petabox has 0.003$/GB and even cheeper in BW, Bunny CDN for example gives already a 0.005$ flat BW price with excellent service and there are more around…
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The idea of being able to commit to a minimum monthly bill to get a lower $/TB/m rate (like Petabox) is an interesting one. Storj already negotiates with large clients… but I guess they could make it formal like Petabox does today.
It looks like Storj is going the other way though (higher margins) by offering the Select service and SOC 2 Type II certifications. That’s the opposite of what Petabox offers: which is your data stored in whoever’s cloud storage they can resell the cheapest… with whatever Jesus-take-the-wheel data security policies that may entail.
I like what Storj is doing: chasing customers who are willing to pay a bit more to get more (like SOC 2). Instead of the race-to-the-bottom market of cheapest $/TB/m regardless of what corners get cut.
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The whole idea of the decentralized storage is we can get for you a decent storage with unmatched prices.
This was true, it’s not anymore.
I made here only a few examples, but there are many, and this is make-since, the storage price did go down, same as BW prices, if Storj won’t adopt then a new Storj will emerge…
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The idea behind Storj was decent prices with unmatched durability. That’s why their benefits page has always mentioned “11 9’s of durability” and has never mentioned “cheap as dirt” 
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The point is, now days almost everyone is very durable…
11 9’s or 9 9’s is the same for the majority of users…
So above that, we need a good price, and the current price is not as good as it was compare the competition.
Most, if not all, of those companies, including Backblaze, that chargers more than storj, are not profitable. Those prices are not sustainable. Storj is already ridiculously cheap for what you get. Race to the bottom is not a good strategy.
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Not profitable is a guess…
Backblaze is here for a long run, BunnyCDN is here for a long time as well (I used it myself, excellent performance and a good price), the same for another supplier.
Is a fact they are here, and they are competitors, do we just going to pretend they are going to vanished tomorrow since they price “is not sustainable”?
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Who do you see as the competition?
You mentioned Bunny: their Cloud storage is $10/TB/month for the first couple regions, then goes up (and Storj has essentially global reach: the fastest nodes you download from get rewarded: no surplus region charges). Still, they could have been a competitor if they didn’t absolutely fail at providing S3. They’re tailored for CDN (unlike Storj) and because of that they aim for cheap egress: makes sense.
You also mentioned Petabox: they do provide S3 and redundancy: so they are a much better comparison. They’re the same price as Storj ($3.99 vs. $4) unless you commit to a minimum payment every month: whether you’ve uploaded a single bit or not. Maybe that is something Storj can consider: they’d accept a bit less money, but have guaranteed cashflow?
It’s going to be interesting to see where the market goes. Maybe SNO’s will stay at $1.50/TB for a year… then will have to drop to $1/TB?
But in the end it’s not like Storj has a ton of cheap near-equivalent competition out there. $4/TB already gets them on the list of cheapest S3 providers. I hope they do well!
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Storj Labs will adjust pricing as necessary like any business. There are a number of benefits that Storj has that allows the service to be very competitive with their current pricing. In addition, new features are being added which will continue to strengthen Storj DCS’s utility and increase its reach to more customers.
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What does this mean? Are we going to see a price drop soon?
When I have alternatives like BunnyCDN that go that low with their BW prices (and have excellent quality, better than Storj) it starts to make me worried…
It’s more than a S3 API…
We have 2 needs in storage, we need reliable storage at a good price and the ability to consume it (BW) at a good price.
Bunny closes for you the problem of a good price BW (with excellent quality) this means that you know all you need is good storage and consume it through Bunny.
you can peak anyone from the list above in mansions and use them at a better price than Storj that have price per segment + price per GB and they are both not low enough to compete.
This is a decentralized solution, we have a couple of thousands of nodes, but a lot of them are a single entity, and in the bottom line, the promise is to get excellent performance, and excellent reliability at an unbitable price.
Bunny will sell you BW at 0.002/GB this is before any negotiation on a super large volume, this is less than 1/3 of Storj’s price! this is HUGE.
before you knew it, Storj became the old pricy solution that didn’t update fast enough.
Idrive solution is 0.004$ flat, no other cost, can’t you see it? the price must go down, Storj is not as competitive as it was.
There are far more than 2 needs in storage: but we can build on your subset. Part of ‘consuming’ storage is having it work with your tools and processes and workflow: in this case it’s S3 support (which Amazon, Petabox, Backblaze B2, Wasabi, iDrive E2 and more offer). It’s important, and Bunny doesn’t do it. And part of ‘at a good price’ is including the at-rest costs of space: and Bunny charges more than double Storj.
You quoted my previous response, so you’ve seen the links (to Bunny) that I included. If you want cheap bandwidth, Bunny certainly offers it! But they don’t support the tools that Amazon / Petabox / Backblaze B2 / Wasabi / iDrive E2 / Storj (and more) do… so using them as a pricing sample for direct competition is disingenuous. Bunny is an excellent and cost-effective CDN provider! They aren’t an alternative to Storj.
Storj has never promised the lowest price. They promise lower-than-Amazon: which has remained true since launch. But I hear what you’re saying.
If Storj believes they have a profitable pricing model now, and “do not anticipate a need to make further changes to the node payout rates for the foreseeable future”… why must the price go down? It certainly could… but they’ve never focused on being the cheapest: as that seems to be a race to the corporate bottom. From what I’ve seen, with offerings like Select: they seem to be chasing higher-margin customers instead of higher-volume. They could let companies like Petabox and iDrive get most of the price-conscious market… while they focus on customers who’ll pay more for premium features (like SOC 2)… and everyone is profitable in their own markets.
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Storj Labs makes money on the spread between what the customers pay and what it pays to storage nodes. The aim should be to match up supply and demand. It’s effectively a market maker. I would guess the pricing decisions are entirely based on the relative growth rates of storage demand and space capacity. I do hope they choose growth rate over margins though. That’s the logical decision as long as you’re cash flow positive.
As I see it for the past 3 years, the data in-flow grew month after month. I can’t even keep up with adding more drives to my farm. So why do we need to make changes? Why do we need to low the price? That’s counterintuitive and counterproductive. This mentality of beeing the cheapest around is bad from every angle and bad for everyone on the vendor side. You just name yourself a low budget - low performance vendor with nothing good to offer to clients other than cheap prices. And you drag the prices down creating problems for the more performant and good establishes vendors.
Don’t be sorry for clients wallets. They have money, they just need good reliable services. The ones that are looking at 0.01 $ difference are not good clients.
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I don’t think that as a customer it’s relevant to me if Storj uses or does not use select (unless I have GDPR issues, which can be solved easily with other centralized providers but only in decentralized like Storj this is a major issue).
I, as a customer looking simply for cheap reliable storage that I can consume cheaply with a good performance, it starts and ends with that.
The Bunny example is not compared to the storage, it shows that BW can be a lot cheaper, and the BW price has a crucial role in storage (please note that you don’t have to pay for storage for Bunny, you can consume BW (CDN) only and they are profitable from much less then Storj).
I add examples for cheaper Storage as well
The idea is, the whole reason to use decentralized here is we have much more bargain power as a company for storage prices and bw prices if companies that are fully centralized can come up with a cheaper price (we don’t talk here about a kid who rent his computer, this is reputable companies with decent (and more than this) service for years) for bw and storage this means one of the two:
A. Storj takes too much, and it’s time to take less and be again the best provider around.
B. Storj can’t fulfill its potential promises, they don’t know how to do that, they going to end like SiaSky…
In my view, that is only one way to stay alive in this storage business.
it is to promise the best performance for the price.
that’s it.
this is not a revolutionary startup that sells something others don’t have, it’s geeky to point on 11 9’s vs 9 9s, practically, as a customer no one cares how you make your sausage in the kitchen, just bring me reliable, performant cheap storage.
The only reason Storj is still alive is because when they started they lived this promise, around we had mainly the AWS robbery, so it was easy to cut their prices.
Currently, there is BackBlaze (which is for some customers cheaper then Storj (depending on how much BW you need, they offer free BW until a certain cap) which is also a reputable company that trades on the stock exchange, we have multiple other suppliers that do the same service (and I mention that before) and all have a grate service.
Then, what is the justification for a company like Storj to stay alive? because it’s decentralized? who cares?
Storj must use its strength, get the best prices from its suppliers and leverage its decentralized nature in that direction and by this have unbeatable prices and performance (since the competitors are centralized, their base cost must be higher, and they actually must have servers to operate and buy and this is expensive)
Maybe like you said nobody cares how it is run as long as its cheap… but out there maybe someone does care about the services or certification the provider have though?
There are many different customers out there as well… and not everyone buys the cheapest… else Apple would be out of business. They provide something of a service/premium than just a phone. They provide an ecosystem across their devices and thats why some customers are stuck with them
Suffice to say, the network usage speaks for itself though, since storage is growing… so there are users willing to pay for the use
And by the way, storj suppliers are nodes operator… they aren’t really dependent on storj as much as storj is dependent on the nodes… unless the entire operating model changes…
Also… it is cheaper to be centralized… since the business is dependent on your contract of renting their storage and thus giving you leverage to ask for discount, especially if you’re a big renter… volume discount exists ya… in decentralized its more expensive, since you are now dealing with alot of small suppliers in order to even meet the bare minimum to run the service… but you can’t ask for volume discount, since no one is providing with a big volume in the first place…
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Exactly! - Truer words were never spoken.
And every customer gets to decide on which parts of the price are their priority. Upload charges? Download? At-rest? Free tiers or caps for any of them? Each user will have their own unique blend to keep their costs low.
And performance is just as nuanced. Certainly upload and download speeds (and latency) are important. And if it doesn’t meet availability minimums, or work with the tools and APIs they need, or has inadequate SLAs, or doesn’t meet data-privacy reqs, or doesn’t accept payments in ways they support, or have business certs that would allow them to be an approved vendor: it doesn’t perform.
It’s almost like… the Cloud Storage market is so diverse that any single company or project couldn’t be the best-fit for every customer. We many need more than one offering?
Of course some customers will only be excited about one thing, and will focus on the vendor that optimizes for that metric above all else. That’s certainly their choice: good for them! But you don’t see them claiming to talk for the entire storage business
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I dont think there is any problem with lack of customers on storj, is you see statistics, ingress is rising all the time, it go by waves, it rise in EU and in USA.
Used storage go up all the time. BTW storj reached the point when stored data is bigger than free space left.
Storj Network Statistics - Grafana (storjstats.info)
so price is OK
Storj take clients who want best performance to price. Storj do not need All client. Best client that can afford the price for your best product.
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About the pricing, Storj in some cases, it can be very expensive (specifically, if you have small files then the price is actually Storage + segments), in my case the combined cost becomes 0.026 per GB stored) (This is VERY expensive)