Huh, maybe you are right and that is why we see some strange numbers floating around!
I will give it a try, but I don’t have all the numbers. To make it even simpler, I leave out repair.
From a customer’s point of view, they pay 4$/TB storage and 7$/TB download. It doesn’t matter if they download from S3, HTTP or any other edge server or use the native STORJ uplink.
From the STORJ perspective, they pay the nodes 1.5$/TB and need to pay 2.7 nodes. That is a total of 4$/TB they pay for storage and 20$/TB egress. What we don’t know is how much they pay per TB traffic for edge services. We only know how much they pay for edge services in total. 2.7M in Q4 2022 or in other words, more than twice of what they pay to nodes! I assume their costs are roughly the same as the rest of the industry so I will use 5$/TB for traffic. Maybe someone from STORJ can chime in on that.
From a node perspective, we get 1.5$/TB for STORAGE and 20$/TB egress.
What does that mean in reality?
Use case 1: a customer uploads 1TB, stores that for one month, and then download that again over a native integration. In that case, the client pays 11$ (4$ storage plus 7$ download) to STORJ. STORJ pays 24$ (20$ egress + 4$ storage) to nodes. So there are 13$ missing and being subsidized by ICO.
Use case 2: a customer uploads 1TB, stores that for one month, and then download that again over S3. In that case, the client pays 11$ (4$ storage plus 7$ download) to STORJ. STORJ pays 24$ (20$ egress + 4$ storage) to nodes plus 5$ to run the S3 gateway. So there are 18$ missing and being subsidized by ICO.
Maybe that helps to understand, why the current model can’t work forever.