As I know in my own experience XS customers are the most expensive for the company’s after some level of rise. So Storj made a threads hold parameter or your usage. Because usually if you pay 1$ or 5$ you need same amount of support, accounting…
It is a Business decision, between you take more people or cut less profitable amount of clients. Yes for some people it is thrustrating but it is business and life. Business is made to bring money not just serving people, it is not socialism.
3 Likes
I was under the impression that Storj was a decentralized, community-driven platform. However, recent developments suggest a shift towards a more traditional corporate structure, potentially at the expense of its user base.
As a node operator, the compensation stands at $1.50 per terabyte for storage, while users are charged $4.00 per TB for the same service. This disparity raises questions about the distribution of revenue, especially considering that the majority of funds appear to be retained by the company rather than being equitably shared with the community that supports the network’s infrastructure.
While it’s understandable that developers and operational costs need to be covered, the current model seems to centralize decision-making power, potentially undermining the decentralized ethos that initially attracted many to the platform. The recent adjustments in payout structures could be perceived as moves to enhance profitability, possibly at the detriment of the community’s interests.
Given these considerations, I plan to maintain my nodes for the next month or two. Should I observe a decline in usage or further shifts that don’t align with the original vision of decentralization, I will consider repurposing my resources for alternative uses.
2 Likes
looks like you do not understand how storj network work at all. people pay 4$ for 1 tb of real data. After it uploaded to network it has Expansion factor as I remember about 2.5-2.8X. so for each 1TB client pays 4$ then storj pays to node operators 1.5x2.5 so it eat out mostly all of thin money.
7 Likes
And as I know from my own experience is that XS clients are not “the most expensive”. Case in point: gmail. taking into consideration the billions of people using gmail, do you think google’s support is swamped with support requests? no, because the product is so simple and works (I’ve had my account since it was invite only, never had a single issue with it).
Case in point 2: my own storj usage: I used it for backups, followed the documentation and set up my automated backups, verifying that it works. No support requests, product just worked.
If tomorrow I realize that storj has accidentally deleted my data, then yes, that is a support request that I didn’t need to open, wasn’t my fault, so I will not just accept that “well support staff needs to be paid”. You caused something not to work as expected, I’m forced to tell you about my issue.
5 Likes
Good.
I have $237.00 credit - that I paid for in storj tokens
My spend is very very low - I am storing a few application backups on storj only plus a bit of data. I was considering expanding this given the size of my credit.
I have now deleted all my data and access keys (which will be mildly annoying if Storj do come up with a better policy that I can use)
Currently I will be deleting my account early next month. Unless Storj come up with something I can use
Hell Amazon S3 will be cheaper - or Backblaze.
To my knowledge - I have only ever used the support feature, though I have asked a couple of questions on this forum
5 Likes
I appreciate the rationale provided. However, it’s important to note that transaction fees alone shouldn’t justify imposing charges that don’t correspond to actual usage. If covering payment processing costs is the primary motivation behind the newly introduced $5 minimum monthly usage fee, it would be more equitable to apply this fee exclusively to users utilizing traditional payment methods, such as credit cards, which inherently incur higher processing costs.
As someone who opts to pay with STORJ tokens—a method that not only aligns with the platform’s decentralized ethos but also typically involves lower transaction fees—it’s disheartening to see no differentiation in the fee structure. This approach seems to overlook the inherent efficiencies and cost savings associated with cryptocurrency transactions.
Implementing a uniform fee across all payment methods may inadvertently discourage users who are committed to supporting the network through its native token. A more nuanced fee structure that reflects the actual costs associated with each payment method would better serve the diverse Storj user base and uphold the principles of fairness and decentralization.
9 Likes
I think there will be more details later, as for now it is standard practice to node clients 1 month before changes then impact price to higher rates. I do not understand why people rush to delete data, they can freely ways some details and then decide. but looks like lot of people in emotions event do not make difference between 1. june and 1. july
1 Like
Why shouldn’t I delete data? (I’ve already deleted it anyway) It doesn’t make financial sense to me, so I have no further use for this service, it’s actually that simple. For $60/year, I can literally buy a new drive every year and keep the previous one as an offline backup, for my use case.
9 Likes
How do I reach the support team to close my account?
I’ve gone through all the steps outlined in the instructions linked but it says “ There’s some recent usage in your project that hasn’t been billed yet.” and to wait to the end of the current billing cycle. I’m not happy to wait and then having to pay $5 all of a sudden.
Was that activity me deleting all the files and buckets?
1 Like
More details later? What about providing ALL the details initially? What about giving this some thought before releasing it to the public?
June and July? They were initially apparently not even sure what will happen if you won’t delete your buckets and/or account within the next day because of that billing cycle.
People were practically told you are not welcome here. A company that stores 30PB of data, nobody knows how much of that on public network, told customers storing less than 1TB of data on public network to leave. Because they are using support too much and accounting is all done by hand. And processing fees are too high 
.
This is a disaster frankly, but TBH I’ve sort of expected such shenanigans since the last Town Hall, where they told us VC funding is on the horizon.
Whoever signed this done so much harm you wouldn’t believe.
The good old Storj is gone, probably with the departure of the former CEO.
11 Likes
Well, if no more detail information that could help me make sense of email I received about this
I think it just simple an end of this project, I do learn tons of things during all these years as a node operator but the ways they deal with customer is … , don’t know what to say
4 Likes
I think Storj have the goal now to make profits. Ther is a lot of VC capital in. And now Storj have to be profitable.
We the community can still fork the project and ramp up a new STORJ. However nobody is doing this due to i think in the end of the day it is a lot of work.
However are there any interest to do ?
2 Likes
I doubt it: like you said finding paying customers is hard: and “the community” would do a crap job of it compared to a company like Storj. Any fork would be stillborn.
Even a VC would have to believe they could 10x the used-space to be interesting (and ideally 100x). But that’s what you use a VC for: show them you have a business model that’s profitable-on-paper… but that needs volume to cover the minimum costs of running the business. Then they risk their money to attempt to achieve that scale… for an outsized portion of ownership. If Storj goes for it: good for them!
Storj made sense for my use case, a small amount of personal data, stored in a distributed cloud with high levels of encryption. I truly do not care about the cryptocurrency stuff. As a system to pay node owners, that’s great that they find enough value in that to contribute their resources, and I’m happy to pay cash to contribute to that service, it’s a fine business model. But as I said above, my monthly invoice is less than $2, you’re asking me to accept a 250% increase to my financial commitment to your platform. This is the kind of “we’re changing everything about how you use our platform” that encouraged me to leave Reddit. I’ll go back to hosting my stuff locally with minio or something. It’s just really sad that suddenly the urge to push for more profits is going to impact another decent service.
edit: another thought, many other services just have a minimum topup amount, I’d be happy to drop $10 into my balance every five months. you’re just adding nothing to the service to justify the cost over that five months going from $10 to $25.
7 Likes
I fail to understand how they are still not profitable, even though they still don’t pay SNOs with money, but with tokens that don’t cost anything for them, yet…
How support and accounting is so costly for small customers?
These only makes me draw the conclusion that the management is faulty.
As Mitsos said, you can make very comprehensive and easy to follow guides about any problem a customer could encounter, based on thousands of tickets that you’ve got; and I’m pretty sure there are a few repetitive problems that almost all customers encounter. In 5 years of v3 service, why the support docs and automatisation is still a problem?
Bad management and/or bad employes.
Even me, without an IT background, I put up a few verry comprehensive guides about useful stuff. And I am not payed. Those employes are paid for… what?
And who does manual invoicing still?
Everything is digital, how come invoicing can’t be automated?
11 Likes
This is completely nonsense, you are killing both a community and an ecosystem, this is bad for all:
- New users, they will not enter a system where they cannot experiment and are immediately facing payment. Aka: no new users
- Existing users <5$: they will leave
- Existing users >5$: part will remain and part will leave (also reading other comments) due to nonsense and losing trust
All of the previous will lead to the same ending, a decrease of existing users, this by itself will probably decrease the gb used and earnings of the node operators (like me) existing and new ones, making the platform not so viable.
Like many others, I’m closing my account.
6 Likes
The delete account process is 2 steps. First you need to delete all data from all projects. It sounds like you completed that part. Second step you can execute on the 4th of the following month (± a few days depending on how fast we are with finishing the invoice process). In your case that should be next week.
3 Likes
I’m not deleting my account or data immediately as a kneejerk reaction, in case a change is made I don’t want to have to reupload my data. Storj seems to be the best option for data hosting and I want to continue using this service. I just can’t afford a minimum monthly fee.
4 Likes
Question. Will I get charged the 5 dollars if I have also 0 byte on the network?
1 Like
min(0,5) = 5 … 20 char