This is doesn’t matter for the reasons, described above.
When you pay for the service, tokens are converted into USD value on sent date and added with 10% to your balance, when you receive a payout as a SNO, you received amount of tokens converted from a USD value on sent date.
Reserves just allows to subsidize SNO, but the main reason doesn’t change: all calculations are made in USD, not STORJ tokens - that’s why the price of the token doesn’t matter.
You may consider the STORJ token as a gift card, you can use its value to pay for the service and can receive it as a payout for your service.
You can add a credit card as backup payment method. Then if the STORJ balance from node operator payouts is insufficient to cover your usage charges on Storj DCS, the difference will be charged to the credit card. Alternately, you can still make additional STORJ deposits to the same wallet address generated by the Storj DCS billing service to top off your balance if you prefer to only pay with STORJ tokens.
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And what if it’s the opposite and I get more as a node operator than I would have to pay as a customer?
Can we either stay on topic, close the thread or at least announce it as no longer valid for the discussion on payment changes?
I am following it in case there is something new added, either from the team or community, but all I read is tangents of tangents. Waste of time to go through all of it in case there is something relevant in-between.
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You already answered that question yourself. Only switch to Storj DCS wallet address temporarily when you want to top it off and otherwise usd your regular wallet address for payouts.
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there is more posibilitie, you can setup binance to recive payment, and setup storj to pay with binance card. but you will need to convert your storj to usdt, but may be also you can setup there storj as payment currency and it will convert automaticly when it pay
It appears free tier will now be 25Gb.
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only for new users, there is announcement also there.
Storj Free Tier Update for New Accounts: 25 GB Storage - Announcements - Storj Community Forum (official)
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Since the payouts are being reduced, will the pricing also be reduced for end users? With new players like Cloudflare R2 which offers free egress, I’m guessing there should be some consideration on this matter to make Storj more competitive and viable.
Causing Storj to lose even more money hardly seems like a strategy to make it viable.
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What decidion was made? Any official info?
They said it will be an update for the proposal untill the end of the month. Last month 
. Let’s not rush them. I enjoy the payouts right now.
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You can play with words all day long but in the end traffic costs money, api calls cost money, and storage cost money.
Providers that like to wow customers by pretending to offer one or more components for free just overcharge you for the remaining paid components. With R2 you just pay (significantly) more for storage.
I prefer to pay for what I use, not for what aggregate average of customers use + markup
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On the other hand, “free” bandwidth, but more expensive storage is probably what I would choose for anything other than backups. The reason is that even thought the bills may be higher (not necessarily), they are more predictable. I would have better control on the amount of space used than on the bandwidth.
Just like renting a VDS - I pay a fixed amount for it and do not have to worry about using CPU time etc. Or my phone plan with minutes I usually do not use up.
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You are correct, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing for consumers: egress is unpredictable, especially if you’re using Storj as an S3 alternative. With Cloudflare the storage is more expensive, the API calls are too but the egress is free, essentially meaning I’m just paying for what I store, and the amount of people that see it, this is significantly cheaper than Storj at scale with 100s of TB egress, it just doesn’t make any sense. The only benefit Storj brings to the table is decentralisation, as R2 also offers CDN and geographic replication. If Storj wants to remain competitive against R2, it would make sense to offer a similar product.
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It may do that, but consider that the only difference between R2 and Storj currently is decentralisation. Which is great but in of itself it doesn’t make sense to pay in some cases x100 more per month. If you have a lot of egress (not necessarily applicable for everyone), which is usually the case for SaaS businesses. Outside of backups, Storj becomes unviable for any other use case.
Given all this, and the current economic climate - one can assume people would pick R2 over Storj, meaning Storj wouldn’t make any money anyway; unless they need decentralisation. The market Storj is in is very price sensitive as evident through out the post, so it’s a case of striking a balance with that to create a competitive product.
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Even if what you say is true in no way does it make sense to increase the loss margin between income and payments. Storj make a loss right now and after they reduce payments to SNO’s there is going to be rather a large drop in income for those SNO’s - Dropping pricing further then means even more cuts for SNO’s which would pretty much almost free at that point or i again increasing the loss for Storj. Storj cannot exist if they make a loss in the long term - but neither can they expect SNO’s to be free. So, I do not see how further price cutting works in anyway.
Another 3.8M STORJ sent to Binance from STORJ MultiSig1 during last week. It is hard to discuss about SNO payments when you compare SNO payments (less than 0.5M STORJ in March) to these huge token movements.
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So my employer has like many others moved their clients to cloud storage and for us the issue is NOT cheapest. It’s a bigger issue for us that Storj is a startup since many startups fail. We would rather pick an established business like Backblaze even if they are higher cost since we are less likely to have to move clients to something else in a mad rush if the business fails. There are no guarantees and no business is completely safe of course
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You make great points, but perhaps it needs to be a combination of price cutting (but also increasing?) and an addition of new services:
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Split Storj into multiple products: one for hot storage and the other for archive at different price points, thus allowing for it to be competitive for different use cases
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Increase the price of storage to 0.005-0.015 per GB, this is a predictable income stream for Storj with minimal impact on consumers as it’s still very competitive
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Offer “transfer” services, again similar to Backblaze to offer migration assistance, especially towards enterprises, now of course this is only scalable to a certain extent
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Charge people for API access, like with Cloudflare while egress is free every time you load an object on the browser it counts against your API quota, this is still cheaper than egress but provides an additional income stream that is far more predictable to the end user and Storj, the pricing could be on par with Cloudflare potentially
The list could go on, but the idea is if Storj wants to compete in the market, it can still be a price leader just in a different way. This becomes ever so important as all providers start to offer the same value, and the only difference is pricing.
I do understand that SNOs need to be paid, and their importance in how Storj works, but I believe they can and should be subsidised by Storj expanding their product range and revised pricing, Im sure some middle ground could be achieved where all parties are satisfied.