Maybe that’s why they told us all now: last business day of the month? Delete immediately and you can make the cutoff?
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I just deleted 220GB from my account. If you’re poor next month snorkel… I’m so sorry 
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Disingenuous much?
No payments, no costs.
Fewer charges, less costs.
If operations are getting too expensive - that’s another story.
But if small accounts are a problem in itself it raises more serious questions.
Overall a very bad move. I hope it was worth it in the end.
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I closed my account. I was not using it anyway, once the free tier disappeared. Before that I was using it for testing, either just to see the performance or if someone on the forum asked a question. I probably used it to store an actual file only a couple of times.
I guess Storj can free up a bit of space in the database.
I am wondering though, is it really so bad that all small/new users need to be overcharged by that much? $5/month is ~1.2TB minimum storage. I guess the focus is on large users and the pesky small users need to go away.
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I might have been unclear.
In the initial post by @Bryanm a reference is made to the cost or payment processing
If this is an issue, have us prepay the account with 50$ at a time or whatever makes sense for their calculations.
Just don’t introduce minimum monthly payments on the basis that the costs are high for handling the payments or usage data.
Usage data will be calculated no matter the account size. If it’s a small account with little traffic and data, it will be less strain on systems, and visa versa if it’s large account.
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I think they want to get rid of the small accounts. A small account does not generate income, but the user can still create support tickets for problems he encounters etc. An hour spent answering the ticket and solving the problem will liekly never be paid by the $0.1/month or whatever the small account pays.
I know a company that got rid of its hosting and domain cusomers (who do not have any other services from the company). Hosting is cheap and domain gets you $1/year, so there is no real profit from a customer who only has a domain and shared hosting, but can still create support tickets.
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Based on other practices, this smells a little bit like a lie. Similar to what you do for Node Operators, you could rollover the payment until it reaches 5$, but I understand it would not look good to investors.
This has the potential to alienate a lot of consumers: especially Node Operators that also use Storj as a product, because NOs know that at least the operational costs for the storage are the same if 1kB or 1TB is used.
I agree with others that there were other, far better ways to address this if the issue was really payment processing. Maybe Storj could elaborate on some details about those costs, so we all could understand better why your business required this decision.
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Knowing they were never targeting regular home users: and always marketed to businesses/industries… I guess I can’t blame them. If they weren’t even charging $60/year before to some customers… responding to even a single support issue probably lost them money on that account that year.
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Please first delete all buckets and access grants so no more additional usage charges accrue, before end of this month. Then after invoicing for May usage is completed, you will be able to finish the account deletion process.
It is important to finish deleting all buckets and access grants before end of this month, otherwise if there is any data left in the account on June 1, account deletion cannot be completed until after invoicing for June usage is done. Any STORJ refund needs to be requested by support ticket. Thank you for your understanding.
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And as @mike noted, these “pesky small users” work at tech companies that have real influence on stack choices. Seems like a ill-thought-out, silly move. There are so many other options that would minimize the cost of payment processing fees. A tragic disappointment.
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FU guys.
I run very small operation and use you all as a secondary backup.
When you did your first minimum monthly charge a few months ago, I was fine because it was less than a dollar month. Seemed weird because most CC processors charge $0.30 a transaction.
No way in hell I’m paying you all $5 a month to “cover your payment processing fees” If you wanted to keep my business, let me pay for like $10 at once and then deduct it over time to remove the monthly cost of transaction fees.
Clearly this is money grab. Pure and simple. And shooting yourselves in the foot to boot.
Definitely deleting my account. What a hassle.
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Reminder that we do provide free trial credits to potential enterprise clients so they can properly test the service by running a POC before making a commitment. Of course this is via a case by case negotiation with our sales team.
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Reminder, withdrawing from my prepaid account balance in Storj headquarters doesn’t have a payment processing fee.
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Reminder that our accounting and support teams do not work free of charge
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Yeah this is feels like another way to only push for bigger customers who will most likely will choose the select network anyways.
I would assume a lot of smaller customers will remove data (i know i will be) and the result will be massive delete wave coming through. As a SNO I already removed 4 nodes of my 7 as they were seeing massive deletes and i figured i would consolidate on the other 3. But if those are under utilized as well i guess i will scale back further.
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Today is May 30 in the US. There are 31 days in May. Disputing fees charged for services already provided would not be justified. If you do not remove all data until June 1 or 2 etc. you only would get charged a small additional amount for the actual usage in the days there still was some remaining data during June. The 5 dollar minimum does not take effect until a July 1.
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For those people that used to share 2.5-3TB for every 1TB they used (having their SNO payout address… be their STORJ deposit address): if they now need to pay for at least 1.25TB (1.25 x 4$/TB/m = $5)… then… they have to have around 3.5TB actually-used space to cover that minimum bill?
These days it can take a year to fill that space.
I guess that’s not good or bad: just something people have to account for now.
Deleting buckets is easy. But if they have to download 1TB to save that data in the bucket first… that may take awhile…
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I understand why you would respond like this, being a representative of StorJ.
But I do trust, that you too understand that the best ambassadors for StorJ, are the tech people that gain knowledge and good experiences, who happens to work at potential customers (tech companies). These people are SNOs, they are the private individual casually finding StorJ on a late wednesday evening browsing the net, they are the project groups doing pre-research etc. Those are the ones you push away.
What you are essentially suggesting is that StorJ are already well known to a degree that it is a given that StorJ is included in these tech companies shortlist, and that they would naturally reach out to get a trial account.
I believe this to be a plain wrong assumption.
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Storj’s biggest source of new customers is probably… a Google search for “cheap S3 storage”. Then referrals from customers in industries they market to. Then maybe their army of SNOs mentioning it in any forum when they get a chance. I doubt the people who aren’t paying at least $60/year… are a source of significant leads.
I get what you’re saying. But lets be honest here…
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