Yes, but then the proposal is to eliminate the discount for the paid accounts also?, that is not what @alexey said
Ok… but as a potential customer:
Sure, but my current provider has multiple professionally run high security datacenters that already guarantee a high level of reliability. I’m not really that concerned with being nuclear war resistant at the moment. But I don’t even fully understand your platform. Your datacenter consists of uncle Joe and aunt Nikki, grandma, and some gamers in their moms basements running on Raspberry Pi’s…?? …and disk drives scattered all over the floor that the cats use to keep warm on a cold night? (I know that’s not accurate for… well, probably most of us here anyway… just making the point of how other people might perceive it.)
I already have one of these with my current provider.
Well come back to this one…
Cool, but you need that more than I do otherwise your “datacenter” would be impossible.
My current provider is pretty up front about their pricing too and since I’ve been with them for a while now I know what to expect.
Awesome, faster is obviously better, but isn’t the latency higher? And do I really NEED it? I guess it really depends on the cost and other factors.
Wow, that’s cheap!
Going back to “simple migration”…
Ok it’s simple, but this simplicity comes at a cost (currently to Storj). We will probably be charged for this at some point.
Optionally we can run our own gateway. No longer quite as simple.
Additionally if we go this route we will be using a VPS to host this gateway. This now comes at a cost for both the VPS itself (probably not a deal breaker) and the bandwidth they charge. Now we’re paying for Storj bandwidth as well as VPS bandwidth which aren’t apparent at surface level. Hmm… maybe not so cheap after all.
Now it looks like you pay more for the storage than your selling it to us for? How is this sustainable? Oh, your going to cut what your paying the independant 3rd parties hosting the data? What assurances do we have they won’t just quit if they’re no longer incentivised? Furthermore, if this is supposedly a decentralized platform, why is Storj (a middleman) even involved? There seems to be to much uncertainty with this model.
From the looks of things I’m sorry to say but we’re not interested in your platform due to the fact that it’s not quite as inexpensive as it appears on the surface, and there’s no real benefits that outweigh the potential risk pertaining to the seemingly unsustainable economic model of the company as well as the uncertainty surrounding all these 3rd party providers.
Storj: WAIT!! What if we charge $10/TB stored and offer a generous free bandwidth package catered to your specific use case?
Think to myself… holy shit balls batman, free bandwidth??? 10 bucks is still less than half what I currently pay just for the data to sit there… just maybe there’s something to this whole decentralized storage thing after all. That sort of savings is definitely worth a second look, plus I can just pay my tech guy to set up all this uplink / gateway stuff I don’t totally understand. Clearly I can see how the company can still actually make money at that price so it’ll probably still be around a year from now… and I don’t really need encryption but I suppose it’s nice to have… and being nuke proof, well thats a nice added bonus. I suppose a little latency isn’t a terrible tradeoff for much faster speeds and this kind of savings and all the other little added perks.
To Storj: Why didn’t you just lead with that?!?!
So in other words to sum it all up… Storj doesn’t really offer much of anything over the competition that MOST people give 2 shits about. Use the one huge advantage Storj has to give them something to give a shit about!
Even at $10/TB ist’s a good deal. Storj can skim $1 off the top for themselves (which looks much better at scale) which would mean they could pay SNO’s $3.21/TB at 2.8x, plus there can still be bandwidth that is paid depending on use cases.
1 Like
Well like I said, for most of us we’re already using the same internet option we would be using even if we weren’t running Storj nodes. As it is currently, nobody except whales are incentivised to upgrade their internet plans as it. So how can you argue that these would be reduced in any way?
As for the wales sure I can see how they would LOSE the incentive at that point so ok… any overage charges should still be paid to SNO’s. How much this would account for in terms of whales is anyones guess right now but it’s still something to think about. If Storj ends up with customers like video streaming services where it’s constant egress maybe just charge a very low rate to them instead of a free package and that gets paid to SNO’s hosting more “hot” data.
I really think this sort of platform, the way it’s implimented, should have plans catered to specific use cases (at least for large customers) as the storage network can essentially be programmed all sorts of ways to be best optimized for different use cases.
Also, what happens currently if I have say 50 TB on a gigabit connection and decide to switch to a DSL connection? Would transfers fail? Would I be penalized in any way? If not, couldn’t you just impliment something like that? So if my internet consistently can’t keep up over a period of time I face disqualification or loss of income at least? Even without a speedtest mechanism?
As for the speedtest idea, at the very least it could be used more as a convenience factor for the network than a limiting one for SNO’s simply to help the network determine what nodes are best for what data. Even if someone manipulates the result to get hot data, if they end up with to much they could be penalized for not keeping up.
1 Like
I suppose the mechanisms and improvements should not be discussed here. So we will get what else and IOPS need to be changed in order to understand how fragmented the disk is, etc.
If we talk about the economic model, then it should be based in my opinion on the scalability for operators, if you want to grow in volume, provide redundancy and use caching with fast channels … so that this can become a main income with the right level of investment. Even if the investment returned only after 3,4,5 years … - then the network will be reliable and the operators will be involved, and not constantly sit on their suitcases and say that they will leave the project because they have a constant income (and its size depends on the volume of the initial investments) and equipment set up and invested, and what is important is their rating (retention or other mechanisms) in the system that does not allow them to go somewhere and then just return.
Large operators can be the basis, and whoever wants to be a small operator, let them be, they will increase accessibility and geographical distribution, decentralization. But the basis must be reliable and assume the possibility of scaling at your own will.
Otherwise, no matter what the price is, this is a project that requires investment, consumes time, but to a greater extent, the operator gains experience, not money.
In general, we are talking about everything in the world here, and what will happen next we will soon see 
1 Like
Probably true, however I think most have already made it quite clear that this proposal is trash so I’m not sure what further purpose this thread really has at this point. I’m trying to point out alternatives but in order to do that people need context. They need to understand how certain things can be done. Without that, how can anyone understand how something like free bandwidth packages and bandwidth paid based on use cases can be implimented and still be profitable for everyone. I’ve been wasting a lot of time in this forum… some just for shits but also because I want Storj to succeed. None of us get paid for our time here (well some might) so as far as I’m concerned I’ll post wherevers at least somewhat relevant where people will pay attention. if my ideas are shit then fine but tell me why and we can discuss it. Maybe we can talk in a separate thread about specifics, but this is related so I’ll continue to post these sorts of things here.
Edit:
I realize this might make me sound like I’m being an ass but I don’t mean it that way.
Is there any way to optimize the costs of running edge services on your end?
I could see the address is resolving from my end for link.storjshare.io are on your own IPv4 subnet. Are you running it in a cloud or baremetal? How about satellites?
I suppose that is already under control, but as someone mentioned before, if any of those services are running on cloud it would be $$$, specially for edge services which uses a lot of bandwidth.
the edge services do cost 4x the price of what SNOs get currently, but thats not really the point here… sure the edge services money could be used towards SNOs, but again that will most likely degrade customer experience.
the problem as it stands…
StorjLabs gets
7$ pr TB egress
4$ pr TB stored (this is before the data expansion factor of 2.7)
thus there is only
7$ pr TB egress and 1.5$ pr TBm from customers.
this is then to be shared between StorjLabs and SNOs
one option could be to let SNOs take over the edge services, however this would only be relevant for SNOs in a position to do so, thus the storage part of the equation still has to make sense for everyone else.
i think it’s best we leave the edge service out of the discussion, because its not really a factor that can be change much.
best case it could become distributed, so all SNOs are part of it… which is highly unlikely
a more likely case would be that some SNOs host the edge services, which just means a better payday for the SNOs involved with hosting edge services.
worst case it proves to be to complicated to implement and its a useless thing to discuss.
we need the economics of StorjLabs and SNOs to make sense for both parties.
else there is no future business for anyone involved.
changing edge services is at best a maybe.
and not really relevant to the conversation… imho
lets try to simplify and distill this discussion down to the essentials.
something needs to give for this to make economical sense.
my best guess would be expansion factor, but thats just because i’m to ignorant to come up with something better. 
1 Like
I’d be out with that proposal.
If you don’t want to change prices for customers this project will be unmaintainable. Node operators need a minimum, and less than 15$ egress/1.5$ TB storage is an insult.
I don’t believe it is. I think it is genuinely a poll of opinion.
BUT it has to happen
3 Likes
A little late to the party but still, here is my take on the proposal:
Storj is not embracing its strengths. It’s not storage itself. You will never be able to compete here with the highly optimized competitors with just the “do not buy hardware” mantra. This is not scalable and unreliable if it’s just a hobby for the every day Joe, specifically if they basically don’t get paid to have a relevant passive income after the adjustment ($1 per TB).
Your strength is the army of node operators that has more or less no traffic costs combined with the built in hot storage and global distribution. This makes it perfect for fire and forget data like live broadcasting or world wide software distribution (e.g. the new fortnite season update that everybody downloaded at the same time, also side question: is this done the traditional centralized way or is this some kind of torrent technique, this must be a crazy amount of data).
My proposal:
- Keep or even increase the storage to $2, compensate the ones who are willing to monitor and run nodes 24/7 accordingly
- Slash the egress price to $1 and charge $2 for the customers, make egress your unique selling point and your core business no one can compete with! Find ways to overcome the S3 dilemma by making uplink usage more appealing
- Pay way less for repair costs ($0.50)
Other thoughts:
Because there is a difference for what purpose customers upload data to the network this should be reflected in the protocol, e.g. if a file is marked as hot by the customer because he’s expecting high temporarily download rates (promotion, new releases etc) it could be distributed in a way that is more performant for storj and the customer (a requirement for hot flag could be to set expiration to max 7 days).
A hot file could be distributed to anyone including the everyday joe that might not be online all the time with a higher replication factor. After a while it would be deleted anyway. A normal file would be distributed to high quality nodes only with lower factor because we know they are reliable and get paid for what they do.
Thanks!
4 Likes
We appreciate everyone providing this detailed feedback and suggestions on what they’d like to see instead of the current proposal. Everyone taking the time out of their day to provide insights into what they feel is fair and what isn’t is useful and is being discussed internally at Storj Labs.
I have seen a lot of proposals to raise prices. Right now, this is very unlikely. The customers would leave the platform. Once you remove the test data, and the customers leave, there is no data for SNO’s.
There may be other ways to cut costs, or to create packages that sell at a different price point. I know, for instance, that many services charge for support contracts when big companies want a level of support that is 24/7 365. This kind of an add-on would potentially generate additional revenue for Storj and could help offset earnings to SNO’s. Creatively, there may be other value added services that could be offered.
But a blanket price increase, not likely.
15 Likes
Add an extra price to use the centralized services - linkshare and gateway to cover their costs. Anyone can use uplink or local gateway for the regular price, but if they want the convenience of the data going through your (I assume more expensive bandwidth) services they get to pay more.
Right now, the customer has no real incentive to use uplink or whatever. I guess the bandwidth/compute costs for the gateway are high enough that even if SNO storage/bandwidth was completely free, there would still be not enough money to pay for them at the current prices the customers pay.
4 Likes
i think 2/3 of customer payouts going to SNOs could be perfectly reasonable… even if it isn’t in todays world… but we are negotiation the future distribution of the wealth that Storj DCS might bring in…
ofc i don’t really have enough information nor voice to accept such a deal on behalf of the other SNOs, but the numbers just barely makes sense for most of us…
i have been buying only 18TB HDD’s to supply my storage requirements for over a year, so i’m not to worried…
I want StorjLabs to succeed for their sake and mine…
worst case i just end up running one node, which i will no doubt neglect.
it will have limited earnings and thus why would i care much…
but i rather keep running more nodes, even if their earnings aren’t amazing…
storage is always in demand… the only issue is if one can deliver it at the prices the customer want…
the internet is still growing at speeds that, is near incomparable to almost anything else in history… storage is a market of the future, the only question is who will own and control that market…
the numbers on the expansion of the internet is clear… storage is a vital and profitable business of the future, the only question is, who will be the new amazon, microsoft or facebook of the coming era.
StorjLabs has a chance to be amongst greatness, if executed correctly.
I have more questions than answers, what do i know…
divide and conquer always seems to work well… 
i will leave it at that before, i digress into gebberish…
2 Likes
All SNOs should be inform by email of this proposal and any chamges of terms and conditions, including payouts.
3 Likes
We can’t move customer prices upwards, that’s pretty clear. And, obviously, this also means we cannot selectively increase prices for customers using the edge services. Yet it would be nice to have some better incentive for customers to use uplink, as opposed to edge services.
Let’s consider the egress price of 7 USD/TB:
- For transfers through uplink, there is one component that needs to be covered by this price: our revenue (SNOs + Storj Inc. together).
- For transfers through the edge services, there are two components: our revenue and the bandwidth cost of the edge service.
It was stated above that the second case covers 95% of traffic, yet is less desirable for us. But it’s more desirable by customers so much that it sidesteps the promise of lower latency and end-to-end encryption when downloading directly from SNOs.
So far discussions also proposed only customer prices to stay the same or go upwards. But that can be also reconsidered? For example, let’s split the edge services bandwidth cost between Storj Inc., the customer, and SNOs.
- Given the incentive, more customers would spend time to integrate their custom software with libuplink, as they’d pay less for this type of traffic. It probably doesn’t have to be a big price reduction seeing how being just slightly cheaper than B2 already attracts customers.
- Storj Inc. would also have better incentive to work on uplink integrations with popular software, as they’d be getting more money from customers directly using uplink. Great for marketing too: you’d be reducing prices! (with some strings attached)
- For SNOs this would mean more traffic directly from customers, making locations away from satellites more desirable (sorry folks with data centers in your backyards ;-)). Also, as SNOs would be a part of this split (i.e. getting more revenue from direct uplink downloads), that would reduce the risk for Storj Inc. coming from setting up a fixed value for SNO revenue as a balance between uplink-generated and edge service-generated traffic.
So, a question to everyone (both SNOs and Storj Inc.): would you consider a proposal with two different revenue schemes for uplink-generated egress and from edge services under promise that Storj Inc. would put more effort into promoting the direct usage of uplink?
4 Likes
And practically unlimited throughput scaling on large transfers. You could basically saturate any connection no matter how fast if you have enough data to transfer and the CPU to support the encryption/decryption on native integrations.
3 Likes
There is a bit of a skewed perspective on that right now as a lot of old data is now test data. I think that difference is a lot smaller if you only look at customer data.
Compared to having to retool your entire software, just setting up the gateway is really simple. Did it myself a few times for some testing. Might take you half an hour the first time.
You can also host it on prem. And there are light weight VPS’s that don’t charge for bandwidth. Depending on your requirements this can be done for a total cost of a few dollars per month.
You’d lose download races and earn significantly less money on egress. So yes, you’d be penalized.
It doesn’t. You seem to have a constructive attitude and some ideas may work, others may not. But it never hurts to share. It’s been a weekend with a lot of ideas being shared and hopefully next week we’ll see some response to those ideas. I think this thread must have been quite eye opening. So we’ll see how this goes.
Source?
I appreciate you clarifying this. Hopefully this will narrow the discussions a little. For what it’s worth, I agree with this assessment right now. This is not the best time for customer price increases. However, I hope reasonable changes to charge extra for edge services, possibly combined with a small price cut for native implementations are still being considered as the customer pricing model now incentivises customers to use the most expansive options to run for Storj Labs.
I would. If this is the cheaper option for everyone involved, we all have an incentive to move towards it. So if Storj would make this cheaper for customers, I’m willing to take a bigger decrease on the egress traffic pay for edge services cases. Though there would have to be a big enough price incentive for customers to move to native integrations or self hosted gateway.
1 Like
So why not run the Storj Edge services there? (I know you cannot run it on one light VPS don’t worry, but you get the direction of my question right?)
Where are these hosted today and how much does bandwidth really cost for them? We recently saw that they needed to be scaled because of demand so it sounds like they would be running on some other cloud provider. Maybe even AWS or Google? I can’t tell.
But maybe there are other options to simply run these services at a lower cost somewhere else?
Well there’s a big difference between having to serve all customers or just one. Additionally the gateway MT and other Storj hosted edge services are highly available and multiregion by default. That’s not easy to replicate on VPS’s. I believe most of the satellite and related infra is hosted on GCP, but they’ve made an exception for repair workers already and I’m not entirely sure that’s where edge services are hosted. As for egress costs, I really hope there are significant volume discounts in place and they are not just paying the sky high standard GCP egress prices. But I simply don’t know. I hope they can share more info with us on that.
Yes I know that. But maybe Storj needs to look into other ways of operation for those.
Remember what Netflix did? They put their cache servers into data servers of like every ISP, to be able to serve their customers at fast speeds without latency.
Maybe Storj needs to start own (own or rented) servers in various data centers which are cheaper than Google and pay significantly less.
I strongly disagree here. Due to inflation prices are going up everywhere. There haven’t been better times to justify a price increase. And I don’t believe a thoughtful slight price increase to Backblaze level ($5/$9-10) would scare away many customers.
Probably more customers are scared off by the lack of certification (HIPAA, GDPR etc.).
I think it is also worth to note that generally the price is not the most important factor for serious enterprises. If it was, Google, Azure and AWS would not have any customers. Price stability in the long term so that a company can adapt to it is often much more important and of course the right package that fits the enterprises needs.
I like for example what @Knowledge has said:
I had hinted something similar when I suggested to integrate Calendly into the website and turn it into an additional revenue stream.
1 Like