I think something got lost in translation there. Since Storj definitely pays for what is stored on your HDD.
1 Like
STORJ doesn’t pay me 1.5$ TB/month, it pays me 25% - 50% - 75% and 100% depending on the month, The total amount you get is after you do a GE, that being said IF you do not get DQ`d in 15 months or have a catastrophic hardware fail…
By the way just think of renting out all our unused HDD space for personal clouds, where you charge 2$ / TB / month even if the usage is way under that… and i mean 2$ / TB is crazy cheap! For that amount you can get away with huge downtimes, nobody would care.
Don’t want to be a party pooper, i like the idea of STORJ, i like the community behind it, and i like being a part of it. But at the end of the day, we are not charity workers and we invested money in the equipment even if we use it for other things also, we invest time in keeping it functional, and the payment we get is at the mercy of “test data” , “client data” , surge payouts etc. And only God knows what we are storing on our HDD for peanuts.
At least being part of it for 5 months, i was hoping that i can build an rough estimate for how much money it would bring me / month, maybe even invest in equipment if it would bring back its investment in 24 months. But after all this time, i have no idea of how profitable something like this could be.
I know you are going to jump on me saying that this is not like mining crypto, i understand it. But for every business there needs to be a profitability calculation and after 5 months, i have no idea how i can make it. Since ive been running my nodes ( 3 in total ) , i made a total of 304STORJ tokens ( SINCE DECEMBER )
Are you running all these nodes in the same /24 subnet? Then it is expected that all these nodes share the same total amount of traffic as if they were a single node, and this means that it will take all of them 3 times as long to get vetted. While they are not yet vetted, they only get 5% of the normal traffic of a vetted node. Vetting a single node now takes more than one month, so I would be surprised if any of your nodes are vetted yet after 3 months running them while competing against each other. And even after 5 months, they probably just barely made it out of vetting stage. Of course none of this applies if you are actually running the nodes in different locations and IPs.
Also in the first 3 months, held back amount is 75%. starting in month 4, it will be reduced to 50%. You do not have to gracefully exit to get back half of the held back amount after your nodes have been online long enough.
2 Likes
They Absolutely do pay 1.5$ TB/M you may not you see it right away is another thing they need to withhold an amount to gain trust for a node.If people were making 100% amount right away why would be the incentive for storj to add a nodes to there network if the people could just get paid and stop there nodes right away…
No one in the right mind would rent hard drive space from someone without the ability of it being up when they need to access there data whenever they want too. Nor would it have the speeds that they would need. Storj has the ablity to stream videos at high speeds if you wanted to. Your not gonna get that from some random person selling “space” on there hard drive with Nextcloud.
No one said being a SNO was gonna be a get rich plan you will start making more once you get past the withhold amounts.
Getting invested is never a good idea you always need to feel out a project before spending any money into it, Time that I have spent on this project has been well worth it to me learning helping etc.
I cannot complain as I never spent anything to get into being a SNO I started with a free PC with hard drives I already had that were unused and just collecting dust anyways. From start to now im sure I made more then I would have if I just did nothing.
3 Likes
I did join the forum before I signed up, and did the math bases on what ppl was saying then, even that was no near what Im seeing now…
I’ve been running Storj since April 6, 2019. One node running on Synology RS3618-xs, 16TB allocated, 1Gb/1Gb ISP. No issues at all, only thing I’ve been doing is updating for each version released. I’ve not invested in any extra hardware for Storj as this server is running 24/7/365 for other purposes so every Storj is a plus.
Total earnings so far 4410.58 Storj so I’m a happy camper 
2 Likes
yes, but only rich would be able to live on that, that don’t pay for hardware or power. Let’s say you have 10TB used, so $15 a month. You need to keep all your drives spinning, and server running, software updated. You need to keep your ISP up, preferably some UPS. All for $15.
No one believes that “cold” storage is the income here, it’s download. It’s almost 20x - and it looked promising while in beta. Now it looks horrible.
I have 0,009% failed download rate, 100% upload and I’m paid shit. I would make more hosting a porn plex server.
1 Like
Most of us was not invited by then and you have been paid by fake money, test traffic. How was your revenue in mars or April?
well then go for it…
Nobody asks you to buy a UPS and have dedicated hardware running for storj.
1 Like
I think all of us have about the same earnings each month / node. I don’t expect to make big money on this and keep in mind that Storj has just been released to the public. Don’t expect 1 miljon customers from day one. It’s more interesting to see what kind of earnings we have in April next year.
I essentially provide this service to friends and family for free. For free, because I made it very clear to them that it comes without any warranty. If my place burns down, the data is gone. I don’t promise uptime and I don’t promise the data will be recoverable, because a home setup can never ensure those things. I wouldn’t dare to charge even a penny for that kind of service. They use it as part of their 3-2-1 backup strategy as a free off-site backup solution and the size is small enough that I don’t mind offering that for free. Nobody should be willing to pay anything for service like that. And nobody should be willing to accept money for a service like that as you would also be liable for data loss.
But back to the node. My node is making about $7 per TB stored this month if you account for egress as well. (not necessarily representative for other months) So your suggestion would be much much worse for profit anyway. Storj actually expects very little from you. And yet they pay you from day one, without knowing whether you can even be trusted. The trade of of having some money held back in the early months is absolutely fair, especially since you’ll even get half of that back when your node reaches 15 months. The other half is still all yours when you decide to leave the network.
Honestly, there isn’t really anything that competes with this. And the free market will show whether it is fair compensation or not. But since the supply side has never really been an issue for Storj, I don’t have good news for you if you think you should be paid more. Honestly, I’m happy that the financials are viable for Storjlabs at launch and they can actually make profit from customers. This simply means that for us SNOs it’s likely to stick around.
But free market cuts both ways. If it were super profitable, the number of nodes in the network grows really fast, because everyone want a piece of the pie. That means that storage and transfers per node drops, which will eventually mean some SNOs will drop out. It’ll automatically settle at a place where it’s profitable, but not unreasonably so. You’re never going to get rich of Storj. Don’t quit your day job. If you thought that was an option, you went into it with the wrong idea.
2 Likes
well storj does in the docs, doh!
yep fully agree, but how it looks now I might have to store 10TB or more, for free, for a full year, and I MIGHT get some stuff back. I’d rather store porn for that.
also bear in mind that I’m not paid in $$ - instead in cryptocurrency that can have 0 value in a year
Can we keep the conversation reasonable? I don’t even know how to respond to a claim that you have to store 10TB for free. That’s simply not true and there’s no useful discussion that can come from claiming that.
3 Likes
Where I live we have the freedom of speech, so I can have whatever opinion I want, you dont have to respond if you dont want, just ignore my comments, that’s not. hard is it?
If you read my other post I clearly stated that I know I’m being paid for “cold storage” - in my example $15 per month - but as that exceeds my cost for storing the data so I’m storing the data for free, or at a loss even.
The age old misused freedom of speech argument. I don’t see any government limiting your speech here. Freedom of speech only protects you against your government, it doesn’t overrule a code of conduct or human decency to keep forum topics productive.
I wasn’t telling you what to do, I was simply asking to keep the conversation reasonable so we can have a productive debate around things. Your tone has shifted to the extremely adversarial and I can’t really help you with that.
What you were going to earn was pretty clear from the start. $1.5 per TB stored and $20 per TB for egress. What exactly is your grievance? If this isn’t enough for you, that’s fair enough and by all means go get a better deal elsewhere if you can. But I don’t understand the negative tone when you’re getting paid for precisely what they told you you would get. (or 2.5x as was the case this month)
If you think your node should be paid more, provide some details and we can perhaps help you optimize your nodes income.
3 Likes
Guys, I agree the payout for March was a bit of a disappointment to us all. However…what we really need is more customers so we all get more storage and traffic! (especially egress traffic!)
Instead of being negative, lets be supportive and spread the Tardigrade word! More customers means more revenue for us all.
3 Likes
I wish, there was a “ignore user” function in discourse. (Edit: actually there is)
It has been said everywhere, don’t buy and run hardware just for STORJ, use hardware which runs anyway for other purposes. You chose not to follow this.
If it’s not profitable for you, just leave as you promised several times AFAIR. I’m happy to take your repair traffic 
Just to give you some numbers, last month I got a payout of $43 and $12 in escrow with ~4.5TB stored data. In January I got $170 + $30. STORJ has been very generous so far with surge payouts and bonuses.
Oh, the good old “I speak for the silent majority”… No, I’m not disappointed at all. We got a surge payout of 2.5. Even without it I still would have made profit and still have plenty of storage left to be filled.
It really wasn’t for me, I received $54 because of the surge payout. Older nodes are seeing some benefit from downloads from the stefanbenten satellite. This means that nodes that are newer and didn’t get data from that satellite at the time are seeing much less in payouts, so there could be large differences. This is in part because the new testing satellite is still getting started and everyone is in the 25% payout period for that satellite. It also means that over time this payout will go up again.
I completely agree with you on the rest of your message though. Tardigrade being a viable and interesting business for both Storjlabs as well as their customers is good for SNOs as well. If brought it to the attention of a few people who might be interested as well. It’s actually a really interesting option for potential customers. And that’s important, but it also limits how much Storj can pay SNOs. I don’t think the payout is unfair, but I do think expectations are skewed. The official earnings estimator doesn’t really help here.
https://storj.io/storage-node-estimator/
Although I see it has been updated to be a little more reasonable, there are still major flaws in there. For example, on a 100mbit (you can’t set it higher) upload, it estimates 8.34TB of egress traffic regardless of how much data you have stored. The slider for storage goes up to 20TB, but even with that amount stored 8.34TB egress doesn’t seem realistic. It also assumes you will fill up 50% of your storage in the first month and it stays there from that point on. Again, not realistic.
Perhaps it is now possible based on the data collected so far to determine a realistic percentage of egress compared to disk storage. Lets for argument say that’s about 10%. Perhaps it’s also fair to assume you get about 1TB growth per month on a good connection. This would depend on download speed, so you might incorporate that by saying 1TB for 50mbit and lower for lower connection speeds, but not higher for higher speeds as there is no longer an advantage above 50mbit for the most part. We also know that during roughly the first month you only get 5% of traffic due to vetting. Based on this you could build a much more realistic estimator… so I did.
Lets assume these inputs:
- 6TB available storage
- 50mbit download
- 25mbit upload
Storjlabs estimator:
My more realistic alternative:
Most importantly this sets the expectation that earnings will be crap during the first few months, but you shouldn’t be discouraged by that because it will get a lot better. However, there are limits to earnings potential in relation to storage size.
For example, if you only share 1TB, it doesn’t matter how fast your connection is, you’re not going to make a lot of money.
Needless to say the official estimator goes a bit nuts on this scenario. Please note, I set it to 1TB, but it assumes only 50% will be used. That’s why it shows 0.5TB.
It also shows that sharing virtually endless storage space doesn’t make you a lot of money right away either. Because it simply takes time to fill that up.
That said, it’s still optimistic on how fast it will fill up. And perhaps egress estimation can be tuned a little. I think this shows that it’s worth it for SNOs to run a node and sets an optimistic enough expectation, without leading to massive disappointment down the road.
I hope something closer to this will be considered. If anyone wants to play with my version of this estimator, I made it available read only at this link. Please copy it to your own account to enter your own values to test with.
Edit: Additional note. Egress is capped by upload speed in case people have relatively low upload speed. I used a bandwidth calculator to find: 100 Mbit/s is equivalent to 32.8725 Terabytes (TB) per month. So mbit/3 is roughly the max TB egress you could get. But because egress can be spiky and it’s not realistic to assume your entire upload will be used constantly, I went with mbit/10 as a more realistic option. Assuming that about a third of your connection would be used for egress.
4 Likes
I have not said I have bought stuff for the pure pleasure of running a StorJ node. But I’m Im not running a StorJ node I can spin-down my drives when Im not using them - that’s impossible with Storj as I will loose every download race in that case.
yes I’m glad repair traffic is 50% off regular traffic. Atm it looks like upload traffic has no race condition, so I can be fair fair of, and receive quite a lot of traffic, but no one will ever need it - apart from, eventually repair traffic.
1 Like