From my observations it seems that nodes eventually fill up but there is no substantial egress.
Is this because of the test patterns?
Or is this because real customers just use tardigrade for backup purposes filling the network?
And if yes to the 2nd question, is the more realistic assumption for SN operators to expect income from stored data only?
Some clarification would be highly appreciated, thanks
Hi,
from what I’ve seen egress is very erratic, the average should be around 10% of your stored data in egress per month. Obviously if you aren’t vetted it goes quite a bit slower. Lately I’ve seen a spike in both ingress and egress (over the last two days). Yesterday I had 120 Gb of ingress and 6Gb of egress.
Of course it will ultimately depend on how customers use tardigrade.
I guess this depends on what you mean by substantial egress. Of course there is no accurate way of predicting actual usage. But if you want some comparative stats, last month, which I consider to have been a slow month, my nearly full 3.1 TB node (disk avg 3.0 TB for the month) had 1.7 TB ingress vs 362 GB egress. This resulted in my node earning more from the egress ($6.36) than the stored data ($4.50).
OK, Im a new node operator and I am very disappointed with the earnings. The payout calculator is off by orders of magnitude (compare to @baker) . Its a shame that you guys need to trick people like me to spin up a node. I think its still a very interesting project, but advertising wrong numbers doesnt help
I’m a new operator and at no point did I feel tricked.
A cursory look through the forums is rife with experienced operators advising that earnings are not huge and will take time to materialise.
My understanding is that the calculator is a third party application run based on certain assumptions which may or may not hold true for many people.
So… stick with it and wish us luck 
If you mean the earnings estimator on storj.io, I completely agree. You can try this one I made for a more realistic look.
More realistic earnings estimator
Most important takeaway is that the first few months always have low payout, no matter how great your setup is. It will also give an indication of your max potential and the first 10 years of income. Though for most setups it’s pretty much the same every year after the first 2. Leave feedback in that topic if you have any.