Been a Storj Node Operator since inception over 3 years ago. It was always the plan to exit at some point as the money made operating the node is really poor.
10TB SSD Raid Node with almost perfect uptime and a perfect reputation netted me about 0.70 cents a day in the last year. I held my coins and never sold them because I knew someday those coins would pump and that 0.70 per day would double or triple. Now that Coinbase has listed Storj and I was able to trade my entire bag twice selling high and buying low, I will no longer be operating a node. Simply put there is more value in just trading the coins vs earning them. Now that the price of the coin is elevated, the payouts in USD will be roughly the same but the amount of coins will be miniscule. This marks the end of an OG operator, simply due to the fact that operators make next to nothing, and the only real play here was to hold coins long until they popped, then make an exit. Sold the hardware investment, sold the coins, didnt exit gracefully.
Funny how the coinbase listing actually made node operators leave, strange like that sometimes. Still believe in the project, but operating a node was always a really meaningless endeavor unless you were holding long in hopes of a pump and exit strategy. I currently can trade my stack of coins once or twice a month and eclipse the amount made running a node. Its over, GL to all.
Good luck, sad to see a veteran go, but we’ll enjoy the repair traffic and carry on.
You invested in hardware although this has always been advised against? Maybe that is why you expected more income than you got and so you became unsatisfied?
Yeah, this totally sounds like a great zero risk no sweat steady income plan 
Also a long time node runner.
I too sold my bags, now I’m thinking about shutting down my 2 nodes since it’s not worth it to run them anymore. We will see if I will or not…
The long term profitability is going to depend heavily on what happens to STORJ as a currency.
If you believe it will follow the path of BTC then any money you make today will be worth it many times over in the future. Then again, if the whole concept of crypto tanks then it’ll be indeed a loss making exercise. Worst case scenario it becomes worthless and you’ll have burned many years of electricity and kit for no payout.
The volatility of cryptocurrency is yet another layer of uncertainty that SNOs running it as a business need to consider and is yet another reason why I think using STORJ for payouts is a complex, ugly, unholy mess that has been deemed inevitable but is off putting for a common mortal and only really suits SNOs with a high risk appetite.
Fortunately I run my nodes just for fun, so don’t really care what happens.
Out of interest, why did you choose to not make a graceful exit?
We’d get the repair traffic either way, wouldn’t we?
Well an SSD Raid is obviously overkill.
However, the question remains: If you shut down your storj node, what are you going to do with the storage? If you’re doing nothing, it will earn nothing. And I doubt you just bought an ssd raid for storj and only run that PC for storj. (Well if you did that then it was certainly not a very wise investment 
)
So as long as storj pays more than the electricity, it’s still profitable. And as an OG you have lots of storage (in contrast to the new people who’ll need 2 years to even fill a few TB) so any HDD investment should be earned back within 2-3 years too.
Bought the 10TB ssds 7 months ago. Made it all back as of last week. Selling the hardware for what i payed 7 months ago. So yeah, your rebuttal is just that.
Bought the 10TB ssds 7 months ago. Made it all back as of last week.
um I payed off the hardware in 7 months… Selling it all for what I payed cause the market is great for used parts rn. Sold 4 of them the first day listed. the initial investment 7 months ago has now tripled.
Literally I hoarded coins til the pop.
graceful exit was worth 35$ over many months. Hardware netted me money and alot of it right now
Plan was to hoard and sell on the spike. I did that and made it all back plus a double on the trades
Seriously this will pay out so little coins now… I think selling rn and just owning and trading the coins is a far better plan. Think when ETH mining became a super hard way to make money. Just trade it
If the company wants long term operators to stick around there has to be an incentive but what can you do if there are no customers?
I recently looked at a page that said filecoin storage costs just 1% of amazon and yet there are no hoards of customers there either
To each their own. I think ive made a perfect exit
yeah that is quite a good move then
I kind of hope my HDDs break before the warranty period is over so I get my money back 
But if not, storj paid for that investment 3 times already due to the spike.
But since Ingress is almost irrelevant, I could theoretically sell one of my 3 HDDs too.
I my salve Invested into hardware. Compare to GPUs SSDs and HDD`s so not depreciate in value that rapidly. if you buy smart
Curious why you say Nodes won’t make anything anymore. They may make less STORJ in total, but the value in USD will be the same as before.
I am hosting 15TB right now and making approx 50€/month. Substraction power costs and trading fees leaves approx. 30€. Makes a net. of 2€/hosted-TB at a HDD-price of 20€/TB. So HDD-space is paid off after 10 month (regarding no further node-growth!). Another 1,5-2 years to pay off the casing Hardware.
So as I see the numbers, you can pay off your hardware within a few years. Making money out of it as a passive income? Barely… At least without crypto-coin speculations…
But as suggested from STORJ itself you should not buy hardware for the specific case (this is what amazon can do themselves much cheaper). So I use my 24/7 Linux machine with Raids and stuff in combination with a remote Server for privat data hosting and data-backup and a ton of other self-hosted services in combination with my private IT-infrastructur and smartphones etc.
Paying off those privatly running thing is indeed a nice thing!
I have 3 nodes running for 20 months now 2 on 12 tb hdds and one on 14 tb and I make every month 100-120$ the best month was 500$… all drives are almost full, I dont understand how others get only few $ a month if the drives are full…
Mhhhh I think it really depends on the use case…
I already have a dedicated server which I use for my All in one Plex server stuff and therefore hosting two VMs inside dedicated to STORJ isn’t much trouble for me. Both nodes pay for the whole server, so I’m fine with that.
But if you think you will get rich with a STORJ node, then you didn’t research properly 