Well then, let my add my 2 cents. They are probably totally unsorted, because I still have to make my mind about the whole situation.
First of all I have to agree with @BrightSilence that the wording and intention is unclear. So it is hard to make good suggestions. Basically the only hard fact is that Storj pays to their node operators more than they receive from their customers, so naturally if you talk about viable economics, the idea of cutting node operator payouts comes to my mind as well.
However the current economic situation with inflation all over the place, it would be a bad timing to reduce payments to node operators. Just to give you 2 examples: Within a week I personally have received announcement from a server hoster that they will increase their price by 300% and my electricity provider announced an increase of 100%. This goes into effect immediately resp. by January 1st. Prices are going up everywhere making running a node more costly.
On the other hand it is a good time to increase prices to customers as in the current economic situation this is what everybody expects and (kind of) understands.
As Backblaze has been mentioned as competitor, I have had a look at their prices and they charge $0.005 GB/Month ($5) for storage and $0.01 GB/Month ($10) for Egress.
So Storj could increase prices and still remain below their level, like $4.50 for storage and and $9 for Egress.
As a bit of a compensation Storj could increase the discount for payment with Storj tokens.
That’s the revenue side. The other side is the cost side. It has been mentioned, we see the test data still occupying space and inducing cost, and maybe the free tier should be reworked in a way that data gets deleted from accounts that are no longer in use. (You could impose a requirement to login monthly or something like that to make sure these are not throw away accounts that don’t bring any revenue but only cost money.)
Another idea that may work is a dedicated satellite for free accounts where node operators could subscribe and agree to either not getting paid or agree to less payment.
I do see and understand the need for the free tier and I think it is a great way to attract potential customers but the question is, is it required to have this data online for free forever or can this data be deleted at some point or slowly transformed into paying data for example by restricting the free duration and then start to charge for it?
Without a doubt to keep SNOs on board, running a node must be rewarding. It needs to work for both small and large setups and it must be rewarding from day one. If simply payout gets reduced, then it won’t really work for smaller setups anymore which will probably lead to larger setups and less decentralization.
But again, it is hard to make detailed suggestions, without knowing which problem should be solved. In general I would say: Incentivize the node behavior that you want to see (like with surge payouts, bonus payments or earlier (partly) return of held amounts) and penalize what hurts or negatively impacts the network.