Suggestions from an (almost) user

Ideas & Suggestions site feedback
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Hi everyone.
A friend of mine spoke to me about Storj, but with the recent update that targeted free users she told me to suggest a couple of things about the service before trying it out. Since she is the type of person that try everything her eyes catches and loves to write about it to an audience thousands of people in different countries (receive feedback as well), I accepted to write in this forum for her and see how it goes:

  1. with the offered services, I think the relationship between Storj and the customers should be one of the top priorities. That’s why receiving emails (maybe even notification in the dashboard) about documents updates, news and info about changes in the service is considered a must.
  2. I have been told that there is two different customer support: personalised and basic. It’s not so clear where the line is though. Adding a virtual chat for the non-paying customer in the dashboard could be a solution, as we can see for any other services.
    If it brings too much noise (understand the minimal trend), maybe give access to a chat inside the dashboard, that recognize automatically what type of services it has to give (the log in has been made so it has to know what type of customer it’s working with), AI doing wonders lately.
  3. What about giving control of the profile to users? In the documents for the terms and services, if I heard right, it is not mentioned how to delete the account and it can not be done from the profile settings. How strange. I am wondering how it can be done, and how can the user be sure it will be deleted?
    If anyone from the team read and find the suggestions useful I am open to more once I will dig deep in Storj.

Thanks for reading, excited to start this decentralized journey with you all!

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Hi @funfada welcome to the forum!

  1. Our relationship with our customers is our top priority. We did post notifications/banners on the Storj account dashboard, announced the change on the forum and send out emails to notify paying customers about the change from free tier to free trial. Our Terms of Service Section 3.(d).vi. states the following:

Company may change or eliminate any Promotional Credit at any time, without notice, including, but not limited to any coupon, or Promotional Credit designated as a free trial or free tier.

Former free tier users were not customers, they enjoyed our service completely free of charge, many of them for many years, without ever upgrading to Pro Account. We recently evaluated the effectiveness of the free tier and how it impacted new customer acquisition. We also looked at the impact of the free tier in COGS as part of a broader, ongoing effort. We determined that the free tier was not as effective in customer acquisition as a free trial and that the free tier was frequently the subject of attempts to aggregate accounts in violation of the Terms of Service. For these reasons we decided to eliminate the free tier in favor of a free trial. Furthermore, we were in full compliance with our ToS when we elected to avoid getting our domain listed as spammers by not sending out thousands and thousands of emails to the non-paying free tier users about the free tier deprecation. Those that looked at our forum announcement of the change or their dashboard would have noticed the upcoming change.

  1. Our Terms of Service state clearly that personalized support via our help desk is only available to paying customers. Other users may post their questions on this forum, where our friendly community members and leaders as well as members of our dev team will be happy to assist as needed. We will not invest more resources to install a virtual chat for non-paying users, the current forum offering is sufficient. Note that offering chat functions in the dashboard or elsewhere would be much more time consuming for support staff than what we currently offer, and may be considered perhaps at some future time for our paying customers.

  2. Adding the option for customers to delete their data themselves is in the planning stages, but not a high priority item afaik as we have many other features that are more important to be able to make current customers happy and attract new ones. Account deletion for free trial users who do not upgrade to a Pro Account before their 30 day trial expires will happen automatically without any need for those user to take any action. They only need to remember to download any important data they want to keep before the expiration of the free trial. Pro Account customers may file a support ticket and we will assist them with the account deletion process. Note that we are also GDPR compliant for those that fall under this legislation.

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Welcome funfada! There are many of us in this forum on a regular basis: if you have a question please post it!

Are you using S3 already (maybe with Amazon) and are looking to get a bit more for your dollar? You’ve come to the right place ! :star_struck:

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Thanks you so much for engaging with this post and I can say that what you write is as clear as the sky but reading your words looks like Storj do not accept suggestions from future customers or am I rushing to conclusions?
Since there could be engagement I can point out a few things:
In the first point you mention that you send out emails to notify paying customers about the change from free tier to free trial but how come a new, free trial user get notified if it’s not a paying one? Especially if the company can change and eliminate the promotional credit at any time without notice as stated in the Terms of Service Section 3.(d).vi.?
I do not know how much space the former free tier had but people, as you said, aggregated accounts I imagine it was quite a lot… so it’s for the spam email thing that you do not send emails to every customer about changes and updates about the company?
How is it better to always access the profile to see updates (unless you have a working app), or worse the forum?
Emails are still the best way to engage the customers, if it goes in the spam folder the user it’s not engaged from the beginning so the problem may be something else…
Since the access to the customer support is easy to reach, and even I can send a request when I am just registered in the forum how can I know the basic and personalized difference? is it the ticket you mention at the end?
Mmmh reading what you wrote made me think that if I am trying a product and have a free trial the free trial should include also the complete customer support as well as the other services doesn’t it? Looks like it’s not like it…
Glad to see you all keep working on new features but what if a user do not delete the data in the account? What happens to it?
It’s clear to me that Storj is aiming at companies with its services even though with the node opportunity attracted (I think) mostly private users so why not saying it from the beginning?

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Thanks Roxor for the warm welcome and the suggestions.
I was looking for a storage service for the companies I work with, for and in and since there are lots of competitors I was diving into them seeing how the customer support, security and then ease of use works.
Had a look around, but I don’t think I will even try the free trial as of now. I don’t have time to look for or ask to look for answer in a forum and I do not know if that’s a coincidence but from all the people I asked to try Storj they all told me that they received answers from the same person, I might give the website to my AI assistant and get the same replies I think…
Will dive deeper and ask questions to people I know that have used it, use it and used it.
It’s quicker for me.

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That’s a great idea! Getting the opinion of users you can trust is always the best way to start any eval.

I understand you don’t have a lot of time: but please let the companies you work with know even if you’re busy there are people who would be happy to put in the time to help get them on Storj S3 directly. I hope you still stick around and check on Storj every couple months!

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We certainly do accept suggestions from customers and also from our Node Operators, which you can see ample evidence of by reading the many threads in this forum. We also have a specific section of this forum dedicated to Ideas and Suggestions. Paying and prospective customers are in direct contact with our Sales team and Solutions Engineers, so their suggestions when they look feasible to implement and potentially beneficial to more customers are added to our public roadmap so they can follow progress on the implementation. Many of our current features originated from customer suggestions.

As a courtesy we sent emails about the migration from free tier to free trial to all paying customers and to a small number of free tier users (before we noted that continuing to send more would get us marked as spammers.)
In any case there was no obligation to notify about this change as per the section of our Terms I quoted before. But we still notify the greatest possible number of users by adding a banner to the dashboard and posting an announcement on this forum.

Note that paying customers previously also enjoyed the benefits of the former free tier coupon, i.e. they also got part of their usage free of charge every month (the same amount as the free tier users.) We deprecated the free tier coupon for both free tier users and paying customers that have Pro Accounts, which is why we decided to notify the Pro Account customers that they would no longer receive the free allowance after the cutoff date.

On the other hand, our users can opt in to receive other general company news by email, and we sent those updates periodically to only those that have opted in. I am not an expert in email marketing so I cannot tell you what specific service is used that allows us to send those specific emails without problems, vs the one-off announcement regarding the deprecation of the free tier.

I think that you have misunderstood what I was referring to regarding spammers. The problem is not that emails may end up in some recipients´ spam folders, but that our own domain may get listed as malicious actor for sending mass mailings, and it is very difficult to undo this once you are on the bad actor list.

So back to the difference of basic vs personalized support. Basic support is available to all users here on the forum. Personalized support is available only to paying customers via filing support tickets on our help desk. Our documentation where you can learn on your own about how things work without asking for help is located here.

Note that up to just recently there was no such thing as a free trial, only Free Tier user vs Pro Account customer. Our current ToS may be updated to accommodate the new free trial users better. I am currently only referring to the ToS that are in place at this moment, and up to now they still specify that support is only available to paying customers.

Of course we use reasonable judgement on a case by case basis, and give the needed attention to our potential customers who have specific questions about our service. In fact, they can ask for a meeting to be put in touch with our sales team and solutions engineers here to discuss their specific needs and to find out if Storj is a fit for them

Regarding data that is not deleted from expired free trial accounts, these accounts get marked for later deletion, and the actual deletion of the data will only happen in batches later as the need to free up space on the network or reduce overhead arises. Paying customers asking for account deletion and qualified customers who file GDPR data erasure/deletion requests will get their data and accounts deleted asap with help from step by step guidance from our support team. We get all GDPR issues resolved in compliance with the law.

The prior free tier likely did attract a lot of end users, however, the change to the 30 day limited free trial will likely drastically change the number of such users on the network in the future. Our target audience is indeed the enterprise customer, not individual end users who during their free trial will quickly find out that this service is not meant for their needs. Already now the great majority of our paying customers are businesses, not individual end users.

Regarding getting answers from the same person to support questions, I am sorry that we do not yet have a big number of support agents, at this time we are perfectly able to handle the load of support tickets we receive with the number of agents we now have available, and provide high quality answers to solve all issues. We are proud of our consistent 95 to 100% customer satisfaction scores and fast turnaround times. I am sorry that you feel that you don´t even want to try out the service but respect your decision.

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I am a regular Windows user, without coding background, with no Linux or Docker expirience.
I decided to join this project more than 3 years ago. As a SNO since 2021, I had many questions and problems to solve, and all I can tell you is that I never made a support ticket or send an email to Storj team asking for help. All info that I needed it has beed provided by the lovely Storj community on this forum, that includes also a part of dev team.
3+ years later, I know how to install a linux server and do basic and some advanced stuff, I know how to operate in CLI, and I run 16 storagenodes flowlessly in Docker, among many many other stuff that I learned.
And a very big part of this knowledge comes from this forum and this project.
So, for me, it’s only win.
I realise that clients have other questions and needs than SNOs, and maybe you can argue other things about Storj, but the lack of support isn’t one of them.
We welcome you in our community and I hope you will realise how beneficial is for you and anyone joining this project!
Distributed storage around the globe is the future and who dosen’t want to be part of the future? :sunglasses:

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I believe you have 2 options:

  1. On https://www.storj.io/ this:
    Screenshot_2024-04-19_022729
    Which seems to bring you to a 1:1 chat with Storj: Meeting With Tom Troy (Storj)

  2. I am not sure, but if you add a form of payment to your free trial account, it may unlock access to support without getting charged while you are on free trial.

If you have a genuine interest to try this storage for your clients and promote it, then this should be doable.

Oh and a 3rd comes into my mind: You could apply as Storj partner or reseller. Then Storj might have a genuine interest in talking with you.

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I think it’s important to reinforce the note, as mentioned, that our initial plan was to send emails to everyone. Unfortunately, when we were in the process of doing so, it became clear that we would risk being blacklisted for the massive amount of emails we would be sending out. We had to make a decision to reduce the email flow to the customers who were setup with payment information.

I think if we did something similar in the future, we would plan around the potential for the mailings to need an alternative platform to be sent out on, as well as advise those signing up to check a location (Such as this forum) for potential news about changes.

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  1. I already posted this same link you mention here to schedule a meeting with sales and solutions engineers in my last post above. Tom will direct the potential customer to the right solutions engineer to discuss their needs as appropriate, or a solutions engineer might already be available on the initial call.

  2. Adding a payment method before the end of the 30 day free trial period will move the customer immediately to paid tier, and qualify them for full personalized support. However, being on paid tier (Pro Account) is not a pre-condition for getting to talk to our sales team and solutions engineers anyway. I also already mentioned that we don´t reject potential customers from getting their support tickets responded. We will be giving them initial guidance, answering simple questions and escalating their tickets to solutions engineers or sales staff as needed for their use case.

The current ToS has not been updated yet to reflect the reality of the new Free Trial tier and how we will handle potential customer tickets. Obviously we will do everything necessary to accommodate getting questions of potential enterprise customers answered. However, we will be directing those individual users who sign up for a free trial but are obviously not our target customers to get their common getting started questions answered in the forum or to read the getting started documentation, as the case may be.

Thank you for pointing out the partnership and reseller opportunities.

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