I can tell you from my experience (I do not work at Storj, but probably in a similar company, in that we provide IT services) and, yes, the small customers are a net loss.
Why? You would think that getting 5EUR/month for hosting a tiny website and a few GB of email on a shared hosting server would be profit, since there does not seem to be any expenses. We thought so too, it turned out we were wrong.
Now, a large company hosting hundreds of thousands of such websites can probably optimize itself, hire cheaper support staff and so on. I work for a small company. Our charges are basically for resources (CPU, RAM etc) and support (hourly) if the issue is not a clear defect on our end.
We have large (for us) customers and had some small ones.
The small customers are the worst. First of all, they pay 5EUR/month for the hosting and also generate a lot of tickets - forgot the password, does not understand how to connect to DirectAdmin, the site looks wrong (we do not offer website design services), the site got hacked because their website designer used an old version of Wordpress and never updated it.
You would say that’s OK, make them pay for support, the way others do. Sure, except the small customers will argue for an hour in an attempt to reduce a 15EUR support charge
(resetting an IP ban for too many incorrect password attempts or creating an email account that he could have done himself) to something less.
So, basically, the small customers generated too many tickets for the money they paid.
I am sure this is the same for Storj. A large customer will create a few tickets about integration or the API or because something is actually broken, but then would pay for it by storing a lot of data. A small customer will create tickets about stuff found in the documentation, like “what is a bucket?”, “I forgot my key, please give me my files”, “how can I make this have a drive letter?”, “how do I upload a file?”. All of these create costs for support and the customer then pays $5/month.
There are costs not just for storing the data, but for just supporting a customer with 1 byte of data. A customer with 1 byte of data probably costs Storj $1G/TB, a customer with 1PB probably costs $5/TB.
This does not work. From my experience, the small customers (at least some of them, and since there are a lot of them, then you are basically guaranteed to have a few) consider themselves large and important, but also lack understanding how this works. So, if a paying customer gets sent to a forum, he will complain that Storj is a crappy company that does not provide support for his very important issue. The complaints and reviews will look bad, because they won’t say if this is a guy with 1MB of data who cannot figure out how to download the file he uploaded or a large company with lots of data that Storj lost. Because the complaint will be something like “Storj won’t give me back my files”.
Is it possible to make profit from small customers? Yes, some companies do it, usually the larger ones, who have lots of employees (so, lower paid support people who reset passwords all day and then higher paid support people for actual issues) and are very efficient. A large company can also absorb some of the bad reviews, so it can also just tell the customer to go read the docs.
Storj service is unusual (compare to, say, email), it needs special understanding how to use it and a lot of people do not have it. Creating an account on a satellite and then using the space for backups is not that simple (I am not talking about us, the node operators). People will run into problems and ask for support. A large customer will have its own IT people who know how to use S3 or can read the docs to figure out how to use uplink. Any tickets they generate will be paid for by them storing 100TB or more on the network.
