lol the way some large companies deal with customers is some max time for answer like 10s, then reply anything looking helpful and if customer still insist, after 2-3 such replays, then! they are allowed to actually think deeper. But todays Ai realy changes things, You can even provide customers some genuine amount of replays even from frontier models to assist them, its faster and cheaper than employees time. Im not talking about chat bot, but real frontier model behind support@mail
the Ai just year ago wasn’t ready but now i think it is.
(Im using llm’s from like november 2025 daily, so im observing this live, i know the limitations too)
Im willing to test that, because i want to create app based on storj to improve customers demand on our nodes. i want it specific for small customers. I have experience in customer service, so maybe i can pull this off even alone. i mean theres less and less excuses what one can do with help of current days tech if You know what You want.
beside, always great to read from You.
That may work for large companies, but let’s say I have 100 customers that pay 5EUR/month. So, for 500EUR/month (actually less because even writing an invoice costs money), I would have to set up the AI bot, train it to answer the basic questions, but then I would still have to deal with the tickets that require a change (removing IP from a blacklist, creating an email address because the customer is incapable of using DirectAdmin, looking into how we could lose his emails before finding out he had configured his email client as POP3 and then the drive in his PC died) and then arguing about the hourly charge.
If there were 1000 such customers, would you be willing to deal with 1000 different people (most of whom can barely turn on the computer) for somewhat less than 5000EUR/month?
If you can, then great, you could probably resell Storj services to those small customers and hopefully make a profit.
Premium rate help hotline?
They have a really bad reputation, man. The thing is, there are YouTube channels trying to trace the wallet activity, and some people are claiming that Storj management was dumping on holders while the token was above $1.80, all the way down to around $0.65.
Now the whole conspiracy is that the old management allegedly pumped and dumped the token and is now filing for bankruptcy to avoid potential legal consequences based on what people are finding in the historical wallet activity.
Obviously, none of this has been proven, but that’s the narrative that’s starting to spread among some holders. What they’re trying to do now might be just cleaning up their image a bit to make it look like they actually care about holders to escape any other further damage to their rep. Who really knows but the entire thing stinks and we can only expect things to completely hit the fan or get better from here on.
We really don’t know what’s going on and everyone is trying to figure out what’s actually going on. The real legal issue question here is what Storj/management represented to buyers versus what storj/insiders actually knew.
I was thinking the exact same thing. There were massive pump and dumps, 2 in a row, then the price only droped. So someone knew about their bankrupcy filing in advance. It didn’t just hapenned over night. So the so called transparency that they bragging about, isn’t so transparent after all.
We can’t point fingers afterall, maybe the current remaining team has nothing to do with that. But as you said, this stinks alot. And I’m pissed because I liked to be a part of this business and I trusted them. I fill so betrayed…
Please provide evidence for your baseless claims. Please don’t invent yet another conspiracy theory, which is, like all the previous ones, completely unfounded. I understand the urgent desire to somehow influence the market, but I have no evidence that anyone at Storj has done anything like that, just like you, right?
Such theories have never helped anyone, and they won’t help anyone now. They only cause harm.
You can look at Storj’s on-chain history yourself.
Storj had 31.35M STORJ in operational reserves going into Q4 2023.
During Q4, 34M STORJ was used, with 31.1M listed under “general operations and liquidity.”
Storj says that included selling part of its reserves on non-US exchanges.
Then in Q1 2024, another 12.5M STORJ was used for general operations and liquidity.
So my question is pretty simple:
If Storj pays node operators in STORJ, what happened to the much larger amount being sold for “operations and liquidity”?
There was a wallet in Q1 that moved a large amount of STORJ and appears to have converted it into fiat/stablecoins.
Where did that money go?
And this matters to holders and buyers. Every time a large amount of tokens is sold into the market, there is more selling pressure and more supply for buyers to absorb. People buying STORJ were effectively buying into a market where large treasury related amounts were being liquidated.
I’m not saying this proves insiders dumped. I’m saying the wallet trail should be transparent enough to raise eyebrows.
STORJ contract:
0xb64ef51c888972c908cfacf59b47c1afbc0ab8ac
My point is the buyers/holders carried this company only to get shat on by the sno’s bashing and being discredited by even the staff. Who will ever trust to throw down money to invest now?
AFAIK they used tokens for VALDI acquisition.
It’s clearly described in the token report: STORJ Token Balances and Flows Report: Q1 2024
And in STORJ Token Balances and Flows Report: Q4 2023
So, all operations are audited by independent firm.
It’s as maximum transparent for the private company as possible.
I had an interesting talk with one of my coworkers today. There is a missperception of what storj actually offers. We are not a cheap backup storage. We are a premium service for customers that can go nowhere else except AWS for performance reasons. Remember that storj select customer? They tried other services but non was able to handle the load. We can. That is our selling point. And its not just that one customer. We have a few of them. They all need more performance than the other cheap alternatives can provide.
So if we want to watch out for new customers we should go for customers that can’t use any other service other than AWS. For these customer we have a high performance alternative.
Bingo. Same discussion from the past…
Performance which could be priced higher than it is now. Keeping this “we are the cheapest” strategy on pretty much brought us were Storj is here today: Chapter 11.
Just increase the price!
I’d rather say Storj is also
a premium service for customers that can go nowhere else except AWS for performance reasons.
I am not sure if there are enough customers if the focus is only on those with a performance issue on AWS.
Great. If that’s the case they should be invited to buy Storj.
For Vivint it would even close a circle:
Back to the roots that would mean.
In September 2014, Vivint, a home automation company, acquired Space Monkey for an undisclosed amount.
History repeating?
We have made suggestions in the past:
Initially Storj was high priced. Then that was changed and low price was chased. I am not against that. But also if there is a great product with a USP nobody else can match, then the price can be higher for that. The goal would be differentiate pricing.
That has been done already. Since July 1st the customers are paying a higher pricing.
I would say that the high performance part was only possible after the node selection was improved and hashstore for the storagenode side. The hashstore rollout isn’t even finished. So looking into the pricing history doesn’t work that well. That feels like pricings for a completly different service. On the surface it looks the same all the years. Not a lot of changes in the frontend. But the backend and with that performance has changed a lot over the years.
By the way. The project that runs Courtlistener would also be an amazing customer for Storj.
Currently they are on AWS: https://pages.awscloud.com/rs/112-TZM-766/images/AWSPS_npo-case-study-free_law_project_Dec-2022.pdf
I’m not familiar with customer pricing, but could it be improved in the sense of making it pricier for low data stored and cheaper for high data stored?
Like if you store less than 10TB, you pay 10$/TB, if you store 10 to 100TB, you pay 7$/TB, an so on?
(fake numbers, just for ex.)
yea i mean, i often advocating for low price for customers, BUT Storj could be priced adequately WHEN max performance is required, like skunk said, i just think cheap option should also be possible, because the nature of SNOs makes that possible like no other cloud!
Like price it even $4/TB and $0/TB but link the egress with stored space, so customer need to upload more data to get bigger egress limit like maybe 1:1 or 1:2 idk im just guessing what makes economic sense, it must be researched and calculated what it should be set a like to win customers.
And cap Reed-Solomon expansion factor to like 2, so
$1.5 x 2 = $3 for SNOs for storage
so 75% for SNOs and 25% for the Storj Inc.
(if 25% too small then adjust the percents, maybe $5/TB, but You know what i mean)
Why only aim for this few super performance demanding customers?
(and why they are not with STORJ anyway if only we can give them what they want?)
And how to decide which nodes are good enough for lower priced tier?
It all can be resolved based on win ratio of egress (node sending data to customers)
Obviously You would want to use more weaker performing nodes,
BUT still, i stand still with the idea that only best winning ratio nodes should get data for storage. Mitigating data for slow VPN/proxy nodes that cant give good egress bandwidth would incentive only good performance nodes to the network.
If Storj Inc. would make sure fastest nodes takes all (almost) i would adapt immediately
no stupid VPNs with 20Mbps egress, i would give You 8Gb/8Gb (costs like 55 Euro/mo)
would set all my 150TB disks in some raid on 1 IP, instead of single disk node,
but that 150TB need to be filled up to 70-90% full,
i ensure the node is fast, and storj need to treat it fairly and give it 70-90% of data
Customers that buy the cheapest option… can often cost more in support than they make the company… and S3 isn’t an idiot-proof toolset. The person paying 50-cents may email support every month asking “How do I download my files?” or “What is a bucket?” or “I forgot my password…”
Storj-technology could support the lowest prices. But low-price-S3-customers won’t support the Storj-company.
Dont worry, i will take care of such customers, i just want to offer them price better than dropbox. First just make them come at all.
Also i will offer only native solution in my app.
Storj could offer free support for the first year, untill the client learns all the quirks; after that, only offer payed support and, of course, the free alternative - community forum.