This is a pattern across the industry, but that said the comments I’ve made are how things would play long into the future (3-5 years from now) where Storj isn’t a start up anymore. But for Storj to have a break through, especially in terms of profits, it needs to be competitive with its pricing, features and the total value provided to the end user.
If you visit Backblaze B2 landing page, you’ll see they immediately draw attention to their pricing, because that’s their go to, this is also similar to R2 where pricing is potentially the only deciding factor as most providers offer similar features anyway. The advantage that Storj has is decentralisation, so I don’t see why with a little infusion of new services and updated pricing Storj should be comfortably able to enjoy market dominance.
Maybe they are trying to move the price up, just to pay us less tokens? With these price manipulations everything it’s possible for the man with the biggest bag.
It’s not so decentralised any more with their gateway services.
The problem for them is that SNO costs have gone up with the rise in electricity prices which means the minimum node size that is now worthwhile has also increased. I used to build my nodes on 3TB drives. I would not do that any more. I think this does mean that the number of nodes in Europe are going to go down once pricing is adjusted - at the same time Storj doesn’t want to be dependent on places like Russia or Ukraine.
Australia is a good example. Very high electricity costs with another 30% expected this year.
Not a large number of nodes in the country. There is no way I could afford to run my current homelab there and it is one reason I left the country as I worked for a large energy consuming company at the time and saw the writing on the wall.
STORJ already offers transfer service and our solutions engineers personally assist important new customers in getting their data moved to our platform. Some of the other items you mention are being discussed. Stay tuned.
Right, as a consumer this is probably fine: you are essentially paying for the “peace of mind”. In reality there are just two possibilities – either you are overpaying, or underpaying (and are subsidized by other users who overpay), depending on your usage.
The former case is obviously undesirable. The latter – it’s a win if you are a consumer that uses more than average of all other consumers, but:
this is not the case for most consumers, by definition, so most lose out.
if you are the minority with above-average usage and are trying to build a business around that and are therefore now relying on continuous subsidies from the provider and other users – this is dangerous, as these subsidies may not be sustainable in the future, there is substantial risk.
I would love a plan that would actually charge me for the CPU time I used, vs CPU time I could use. Because that would have been cheaper, you usually not running those CPUS above average utilization.
The phone plan is an interesting aside – I use 0 minutes per month, but about 120GB of traffic, from an unlimited plan. So yeah, I’m in the same boat, as a consumer. But I would not predicate my business on being able to get unlimited LTE traffic for a fixed price for long.
Why is unpredictable? It’s scaled compared to S3, but the scaling factor is more or less consistent.
I’m sure there is something in the terms of service that if your egress significantly exceeds stored amount you might end up needing to re-negotiate your contract with such providers. With Cloudflare it might be a bit more complicated, as being a CDN is their core business, but I would not expect to be able to pay $10 a month and egress petabytes of traffic
Even if I am overpaying in general, I am protected from surprise bills.
It may be cheaper by a little bit normally, but then something would lock up with 100% CPU usage and I would get an invoice for 20EUR instead of the normal, say, 5EUR. I’d rather pay 7EUR, but be certain that it is not going to be more than that.
It is unpredictable because it depends on the usage. Let’s say I run a video website (basically a clone of Youtube). Suddenly one video gets viral and that month egress is triple the average.
and I’m only highlighting R2 here, but you’d get the same result using B2 with cloudflare as the CDN, no egress. For context, the “Enterprise” plan is a bit expensive sure, which is between 1000 - 5000 USD per month, compared to paying the egress fees on Storj at 1 PB which is $7,000~ which becomes even more expensive when you consider the fact that Cloudflare provides a ton of other features in that enterprise plan outside just your storage requirements, that is if you needed it which is up for question.
To conclude with R2, you won’t have any bills related to egress, at most you’d have to upgrade to their enterprise plan which is fixed pricing. Your storage costs are higher but these are again fixed and predictable, you know exactly how much you’ll store, the only variable cost with R2 is how many visits your files get against their API calls, which is far easier to predict than with Storj, where you have to predict how many people will view your files x how big each file is. R2 just comes out cheaper currently. So outside of backups Storj falls short of anything that requires a ton of downloads: file sharing, image / audio / video hosting, even storing a camera feed that needs to be replayed on a daily basis will cost you dearly.
P.S. not affiliated with Cloudflare, even though it may look like i’m promoting them, I think R2 is a great product and something Storj can take inspiration from.
I hope not.
Also, I’ve seen quite a lot of ingress traffic on my nodes lately so it seems like there may have been quite a lot of new data so I’m hoping some big customers are coming on board.
many companies offer services for less than their true cost when trying to push into a new market…
doesn’t mean they won’t raise the prices later on to make it all back…
there is always a cost and if there isn’t its only because one is paying in some other way.
