I like the concept, but I think those prices are too high in the current market. Storj is still trying to break through and low prices are a very good way to do that. Backblaze offers $5/TB with $10/TB egress costs. Storj could match the $5 for storage and keep SNOs at the current $1.50/TB. The expansion factor is around 2.5x on average I believe. So $3.75 would go to SNOs, Storj keeps $1.25. Though I believe they have a revenue share of 20% with channel partners… or something in that range. So that would leave only $0.25 for Storj if a channel partner brought them on board. Wasabi offers (slow) egress for free up to the amount of data stored per month. Storj could possibly replicate that and only pay SNOs for egress that is also paid for by customers. Or calculate a reasonable flat egress rate for SNOs.
The problem remains that they have to cover egress costs for their gateway MT. Which isn’t cheap. I think an added charge there is quite reasonable, since customers have the option to avoid that added charge by using the native uplink or self hosted gateway ST.
But this only works if there are enough large egress cases so there is some money to be made on that.
Realistically speaking though… Node operators do have it quite good right now. At current pricing you could make $750 profit in 5 years on an 8TB HDD of $180 after subtracting initial purchase cost and ridiculous energy costs of $0.66/kWh. I am shooting myself in the foot by saying this, but that’s kind of a ridiculous ROI. So they can afford to drop payouts a bit.
8TB HDD
Purchase cost: $180
Energy costs for 5 years: $250
Estimated revenue with current payouts over 5 years: $1180
Profit: $750
Cost as part of revenue: 36%
20TB HDD
Purchase cost: $350
Energy costs for 5 years: $250
Estimated revenue with current payouts over 5 years: $2400
Profit: $1800
Cost as part of revenue: 25%
But if they cut payouts in half, that would change ROI significantly as the costs becomes a MUCH larger part of revenue. 72% in the first example, 50% in the second. That’s already a very limited profit potential. And sure, most HDD’s will probably last beyond 5 years, but I picked that as that is generally the timeframe they can reliably be used in data center applications.
So yeah, there is some margin to play with… but it’s not as big as it might initially seem.
Larger HDDs will help with that though.