Isn’t it actually worse than this since:
- Doesn’t include the zksync 10% bonus.
- Does not include the bonus paid Ukraine SNO’s.
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where do you include the percentage of dummy/synthetic data paid 100% by Storj?
Even worse if the synthetic load is created by any external “Service Provider”.
So now, the customer pays for 1 TB / month (1 TB storage and 1 TB traffic) $11.
For the same Storj Labs pays to SNO $24.14.
Not very profitable indeed.
Now - if you compare the customer’s price with the e.g. AWS price (storage 0.023 / GB / month and traffic 0.09 USD / GB - based on https://calculator.aws/) for the same - it would be $115.16 for the same parameters in AWS Standard S3.
So now the question is - is reducing SNO cost the best way to become profitable? if e.g. you target AWS customers using value proposition that migrating to storj they will save a lot of money - this still would be valid even if they pay $50. This is still attractive - less than $11 which is now the case, but still…
Forcing SNO to accommodate this and adjust to this dumping price will sooner or later kill the network as there are not many SNOs that will be able to survive this.
Think - how much it took to build a 22 k SNOs network - how much time, money, effort. And now it is really a pivot point (I can imagine) for Storj Labs - as the times in IT business are getting hard - companies are looking for savings (I believe increased traffic in the network recent weeks is caused by this factor not via free tier abuse) so now the situation is that if they will not become profitable very soon - will die - as they need do subside every GB sold.
Of course this will not make Storj net profitable any time soon, but will increase chances of getting additional funding which will allow Storj to survive until this moment.
Now - the question is how this will be done. If you increase the customers prices - some of them will probably quit (but to quit they will have to have where to quit - which is not so simple to find even for $50 price), but many will stay. Still you will have the product to sell (as noticed before - not only price is storj competitive advantage - resilience, privacy by design). If you force SNOs to stop the nodes (which is highly probable scenario with proposed prices in the very first post and energy prices we have today) - then your product is dead.
So guys - I really keep my fingers crossed for you! Do not waste the great work you have done so far!
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Doesn’t matter, it’s a paid data anyway.
Yes, but everyone mention here backblaze and other wasabies.
We should consider this too unfortunately.
I would mostly agree here but let’s try to back this up with some numbers. For that let’s assume SNOs agree to the following payout structure:
- 1$ per TB storage
- 3$ per TB egress
Now let’s further assume that 5PB is real customer data and 4PB is real cusormer egress at the moment taken from the statistics page. Also storj finds a way to lower the expansion factor to 2. That leaves us with
$4 * 5 * 1000 = $20000 revenue for storage
$7 * 4 * 1000 = $28000 revenue for egress
$1 * 5 * 1000 * 2 = $10000 SNOs expenses
$3 * 4 * 1000 = $12000 SNOs expenses
That’s $26000 each month left to pay bills.
Let’s compare this with the biggest side of expenses which traditionally is salary and assume they pay 5000$ on average for 100 employees this alone would be $500000, the network would need to rise to more than 100PB until the end of the Storj token runway.
Of course there are other expenses but also other revenue streams.
Even if the calculation is extremely simplified it shows that the amount of paying customers or their data needs to increase drastically (at least 25x) to be able to operate without further major third party investment.
But if they manage to 10x the network with constant growth I’m pretty sure it should be no problem to get such an investment and ensure the future of the company after the reserves are gone.
No, it’s 80/29, but the repair threshold is higher than usual because of
Unfortunately / fortunately - it depends - it depends on what customers you are aiming for. If customers like current AWS customers - so companies - then even now (in hard times when companies are looking for savings) price is not the only factor that plays role in decision where to move to.
If you look into wasabi terms - you will find (Pay-go Pricing FAQs - Wasabi):
" How does Wasabi’s free egress policy work?
…
- If your monthly egress data transfer is less than or equal to your active storage volume, then your storage use case is a good fit for Wasabi’s free egress policy
- If your monthly egress data transfer is greater than your active storage volume, then your storage use case is not a good fit for Wasabi’s free egress policy
…
"
So even wasabi offer looks very well at first look - believe me - any serious company would not not go for this. Of course for these customers they have reserved capacity product - but this - I believe - is then a different story in terms of price.
Anyhow - even being the cheapest - you will not with everyone - so is it really the way to go? Maybe it’s better to find own niche.
As a node operator (6TB of 10 ) i think i can live with an 33%(permanent)-50%(limited time /eg. 1Y) cut,
just to help out.
anything below would not make it worth the “waking-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-to-uptimerobot” and “24GB-txt-logfile-to-care-about” hobby.
at 75% permanent cut i wouldn’t even care to GE, and sell the plate on ebay for a 0-sum-deal.
also im willing to hodl my storj for a while 
I’ve tried making this point before but Storj doesn’t seem to either understand or care. All they care about is being the absolute cheapest option out there. Personally and especially professionally I won’t even consider the cheapest ANYTHING. Generally whenever you go for the cheapest option available it’s crap. We all know this. You get what you pay for… so why should this be any different right? Even if it is an exception to the rule, it doesn’t change the rule and how people see it. Average people buy cheap simply because they can’t afford better or it’s just not something all that important in the first place like a one time use tool. It might be made out of chinesium, but if It at least gets the job done I don’t care if it breaks. However people who can afford things like large companies will often over pay for things just because they think there better even if there not. In tech, enterprise equipment is always more expensive than consumer grade… duh… you don’t see datacenters buying cheap computers to save a buck do you? What drives to they buy? Do they buy the cheapest? No! They usually buy the most expensive products on the market since they also tend to be more reliable. So yeah, being the cheapest anything actually hurts you. Imagine (insert ANY fancy expensive restrauant here) trying to compete with McDonalds prices. It’s laughable.
2 Likes
A segment starts at 80 pieces and gets repaired when it goes below 55 or so. The actual number of stored (paid) pieces will be somewhere in between. According to Grafana the mean is somewhere around 60-65.
And we see cheaper ones trying to get into that market:
S3 compatible hosting and integration with MEGA product suite
MEGA S4 is compatible with Amazon S3 and is integrated with our existing product suite.
At 5 NZD per TB per month, MEGA is 7 times cheaper than Amazon S3 and offers infinite scalability. Also, our prices are the same for both hot and cold data storage.
https://twitter.com/MEGAprivacy/status/1478439694195052545
€2.99 per TB of storage per month. No fees for egress or API requests.
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Well I guess Storj should just pack up and go home then.
No, I don’t think so. But it shows that trying to be the cheapest will probably not be successful.
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Well no, Storj can’t be the cheapest. If they ran all their own hardware then they might have a chance, but they would also loose much of the decentralization aspect. Fact is, Storj is a middleman. Other companies can be even cheaper because their not reselling storage space. I mean, if I built a datacenter I could sell storage cheaper than Storj… I know that… if that weren’t true there would be no SNOs to begin with. Obviously that doesn’t take marketing etc into account, but that’s not really the point. Storj can’t win people over by trying to be the cheapest. They have to use their strengths to market the product and charge a fair price for it. Is Storj trying to compete with the big tech giants or the “little” guys? Because the big tech giants clearly don’t seem to be threatened by them little guys… and there’s a reason for that.
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Fun fact is, there are other providers than the tech giants who don’t mind charging much more than e.g. Wasabi or Backblaze.
Here is OVH depending on service type Price list: A comparison of our Public Cloud offers
Standard Object Storage - S3 API
| Name | Price |
|---|---|
| Incoming public traffic | Included |
| Ingoing Internal Traffic | Included |
| Outgoing Internal traffic | Included |
| Outgoing public traffic | $0.011 /GB |
| Replica Storage ( Erasure Coding 6+3) | $0.008 /month/GB |
High Performance Object Storage - S3 API
| Name | Price |
|---|---|
| Incoming public traffic | Included |
| Ingoing Internal Traffic | Included |
| Outgoing Internal traffic | Included |
| Outgoing public traffic | $0.011 /GB |
| Replica Storage ( Erasure Coding 6+3) | $0.03 /month/GB |
Standard object storage (SWIFT)
| Name | Price |
|---|---|
| Incoming traffic | Included |
| Outgoing traffic | $0.011 /GB |
| Storage replicated x3 | $0.0123 /month/GB |
and e.g. Serverspace.io https://serverspace.io/services/object-storage/:
Data Storage 1 TB: €18
Outbound Transfer 1 TB: €14
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and there are few pretty good to start with - like resilience, data distribution, built-in security and data privacy, no data centers - running on spare resources - capacity and processing power - therefore “green” / eco by design, and on top fair price for value.
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The fact that Storj dosen’t request a premium for it’s uniqueness seems odd and wrong business aproach, but assuming that there are very smart guys working, I think this is just temporary. I believe that their strategy is first to cut payout prices for SNOs, and have a base price and a base storagenode network from wich they will build the next move: increasing customer prices for base service and extra services. They will increase customer prices for sure, but payouts for SNOs will remain down for a long time, and maybe never go up again.
Surely there are smart guys there, but I believe similarly here (SNOs) 
I do not have insights into Storj plans, but if they ask us for feedback - there is a chance it will be taken into account (if it is provided). At the end - at least with the current business model and shape of the network (regardless if they like it or not) - we are the part of this business delivering the core service (storage, bandwidth and power) with all the features Storj has (resilience, data distribution, built-in security and data privacy, “green” / eco by design), which Storj then sells. To make this business running both must co-exist - that’s clear.
So now - I really hope Storj guys are smart enough to balance all variables in this equation in a way that Storj not only exists, but is growing. As I do not have insights into storj internal situations - plans, financials etc. I can only base on information snippets and my point of view to help them find this balance, which I believe will be a real challenge, no matter how smart they are - still they are only ones who have all the information on the table to to it right.
My point is that at the end it does not matter if they cut our (SNO) prices by 1/3 or by half - it is only one of the factors, but not giving a full picture to SNO to decide to either stay or quit - imagine they cut prices by 50%, but at the same time gaining new active customers and at the end node are getting 3x more traffic than today - at the end price is lower, but you earn more…
Regarding competition - there is already a lot and will be more and more every day - just starting the journeys - with high hopes and high capital reserves - they will be selling bellow the service cost - same as you are now - but long term it is a way to nowhere - so really better prioritize other storj features than price in the first place.
Regarding data centers cheaper than SNO model - I have just found this one: tebi.io - data center based, 3 copies resilience - still $28 (1 TB storge, 1 TB transfer)…
We should not forget that Storj is still very small and relatively unknown. Their focus is predominantly on small business and developers at the moment. Because that is what the network is sized for. If you have no wide spread name and no big time references, you can’t just price yourself like you do. This is how every small startup starts out. You basically make a deal they can’t refuse. On top of that, Storj has the challenge to convince people that it’s ok that their data is stored on untrusted node operators with varying setups all around the world. It seems the pricing is currently working for them and raising it now would be a big risk. I think there is a middle ground to be found here. Something probably needs to be done about the cost of edge services. But because of the situation I just described, my suggestion has always been to lower prices for native integrations in conjunction with an additional fee for the use of edge services. That keeps Storj right in the same ballpark as other price competitors and usually even a bit lower.
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