New pricing announcement

And that’s also fine, I’m not criticising anyone who wants to make money out of running a node, it’s a perfectly sensible proposition.

Intricate tapestry of life an all that :slight_smile:

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Sure, just wanted to show a different perspective so nobody can claim that only “true believers” are staying with storj. (or whatever argument you can imagine)

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Sorry, that was not my intention. I’m sorry if it came across that way.

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It did not to me.
Many here are enthusiasts and that’s great. It just can quickly drown other opinions due to the amount of answers or because not everyone is answering. That’s just how things often work, nothing wrong with your comment.

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Sure, I wanna make some money too. But it’s still a far throw away from the crypto investor crowd. I do think we rarely see them here on the forums.

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Same, this was literally the only reason I got into Storj. I have a server where, at least for the time being, the storage available (as I replace aged/failing hard drives with new ones) is growing as fast or faster than my actual need for that storage. Storj doesn’t pay much, but enough to make it very much not worth my time to go through the considerable effort of rearchitecting my pool to use fewer drives.

And if in the future I can’t sacrifice that space to Storj anymore? I do a GE and move on, satisfied with the fact that Storj was able to effectively pay for about two hard drives I was going to buy with or without it.

If I was deploying this on hardware I had to buy just for it, I don’t think I’d have ever broken even.

Since the nodes are engaged to a bare minimum of 16 months, it would be fair to announce NOW what will the payout scheme be in 2022 so new SNOs can estimate whether it is economically viable to engage their resources with Storj or another project like chia.net.

Or have you planned to let the SNOs to immediately GE if the price change ?

Best regards,

Currently you can do a GE after 6 months, so no problem there.
(or at least I’m not aware that this number has changed)

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Not if you want to get your held amount back :

  • Months 1-3 : 75% of Storage Node revenue is withheld, 25% is paid to the Storage Node Operator

  • Months 4-6 : 50% of Storage Node revenue is withheld, 50% is paid to the Storage Node Operator

  • Months 7-9 : 25% of Storage Node revenue is withheld, 75% is paid to the Storage Node Operator

  • Months 10-15 : 100% of Storage Node revenue is paid to the storage node operator

  • After Month 15 : 50% of total withholdings are returned to Storage Node Operator, with the remaining 50% held until the node gracefully exits the network

source : How does held back amount work? - Node Operator

If you run a GE on a node after 6 months, you will get your entire held amount back. The table you provided outlines how much is held back with each payout cycle. This is unrelated to receiving the held amount after GE.

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I’m still hoping to get paid with a live goat one day :grin: what’s the threshold for that type of payment?

(the whitepaper outlines the possibility to pay node operators with different forms of payments, mentioning live goats among other things. Note: it’s just a whitepaper about the network technology. Storjlabs doesn’t offer to pay with live goats and doesn’t allow customers to pay with them either… Would be funny though. One live goat for 100TBm and 100TB traffic :rofl:)

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Google says goats typically cost between $100 and $800, not sure you want one as a compensation for 100TB of traffc.

Don’t forget shipping costs and import taxes :rofl:

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Looks like average price of unregistered goats comes down to around $200, but shipping will cost at least that much, so counting the threshold (no goats on L2 :crazy_face:) you’d have to make about 4 goats before payout can happen.

It’s simple to enable too. Just add the following to your config.yaml:

operator.wallet-features: ["livegoat"]

Or if you want zksync as fallback

operator.wallet-features: ["livegoat","zksync"]

Note: Live goat payouts may not yet be implemented. Until they are other listed wallet features or traditional payouts will be used as fallback. Setting livegoat as wallet-feature tells Storj Labs you are interested and might speed up implementation.

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We’ve seen a number of questions about the new pricing and how we handle payouts, so hopefully this clears up some of the questions about node payouts in light of new pricing. With the current launch and over the coming year, you’ll notice our team testing some new pricing for customers purchasing cloud storage to gauge how it impacts the adoption of our product. We predict we’ll see more adoption from customers who utilize more bandwidth (which will mean higher earnings for Node Operators).

While we’re modifying our pricing, we don’t intend to modify how much we pay Node Operators. Node Operators can rest assured they’ll continue earning the same amount of revenue per TB of data stored and bandwidth utilized through the rest of 2021. We don’t yet know how the new pricing will work (and we will definitely be trying out different models throughout the year), but we do recognize we can’t do any of this without Node Operators like you! So please, stick with us while we figure out which pricing model works best. We’ll continue to do our best to take great care of you.

As Node Operators, you know we always strive to pay you most of the revenue we earn from customers storing data on Storj. For reference, Node Operators are paid $20/TB for egress bandwidth, $10/TB for repair and audit bandwidth, and $1.50/TB for utilized disk space. We expect those amounts will remain the same throughout 2021 (and possibly further).

It’s very important to us that storage node operators have confidence that it’s a strategic priority for us to ensure operating a storage node is economically viable and rewarding. We’re looking to target use cases that have higher bandwidth usage with the current product, roadmap and pricing strategy. As a number of community members have pointed out, more bandwidth usage makes all the difference.

To achieve that objective, we need a stable supply of storage nodes and we need a great service that is competitively priced. Our current strategy is intended to allow us to achieve both of those goals.

If you have questions, please keep the dialog going!

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Are you going to test different pricings using the same satellites? Or will there be more satellites in the future with different pricings and/or feature sets?

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And then some…
I think that’s where most of the questions come from. With the current pricing model you’re taking a loss. Which is not uncommon for startups or new product launches of course, but I think it might help to acknowledge that part and explain in short why that’s not a bad idea.

And I know it sucks to have to say it… but it’s also highly likely that no matter what price point you settle at for customers, payouts per TB for node operators will likely drop at some point. Because it seems highly unlikely that customer pricing will return to where it was. (And I’m not saying it should, I think dropping the pricing was the right move for everyone. I’m with you on that.)
I’ll make it a little easier to acknowledge that by saying I believe that if this leads to higher bandwidth use cases, the new payout model, despite having lower amounts per TB could in fact be more profitable for node operators. I’m fully with you on this move. I’m just not a fan of only acknowledging one side of the story without addressing the elephant in the room.

Let me make one further point. You’re being very generous by taking a loss for at least this year. Even if usage would go up as a result. SNOs will get higher payouts and be happy for a while, but then get used to that in no time. Now jump forward a year (or maybe even a bit more). If you mention the down side only then, it’s going to just be a bad thing. SNOs will just be pissed about the pay cut instead of happy they got paid more while you were growing customer usage.
I say just be open about it. Make it clear that once you’ve found the best price point for customers that attracts the most revenue, you will adjust SNO payout to match. Explain that you’re also working on optimizing steps in between, like lowering the expansion factor and achieving larger scale, that allows you to increase the cut paid out to SNOs, but that $5-$20 = $-15 of profit isn’t long term sustainable. Get ahead of the claims of a price cut so it won’t feel like you’re taking away money we’re owed, but instead show that you can only give a gift for so long. Ok, I’ll end my rant here.

I do appreciate your communication, honestly. It just would be nice if the other side is at least acknowledged. We can handle it. And we can also handle hearing that you don’t know where things will settle yet.

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There is noticable drop in traffic. Who knows maybe earlier we got lots of test data and got payments for it.
Now we will be getting only real client data.
Who knows maybe this is actually the delta that we had for past year and now it is moved to another part.

This is just my guess based on recent changes that I see.

Unfortunately it’s not so easy. The traffic can fluctuate a lot. Nothing common with mining and stable hash-power.
Humans still not predictable

In terms of the drop in test traffic, I can give some insight there. The drop. in test traffic is largely related to the body of effort around deploying the metainfo refactor and shifting to the new multiregion satellites. We reduced test traffic to make those deployments and the associated validations easier.

With the release of the hosted gateway service and the new pricing, we’re seeing some very good early activity. We’re also able to support a wider range of use cases and especially higher bandwidth use cases.

Some of our ongoing work (QUIC for example) is focused on performance improvements as well. Our test patterns are also shifting to cover more simulations for higher bandwidth use cases.

I think the point is - don’t be alarmed by changing usage and test patterns. They will change over time, but we’re not signaling any long term plan or trend to pull back on data on the network.

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