Comment by Youden
5 years ago
The monthly storage costs are too high. For the price of 1TB from you (15€), I can buy more than 2 TB just about anywhere else.
Commercially, Apple and Google are both 2TB for 10 CHF and Amazon gives you unlimited as part of a Prime membership. Storage providers like Backblaze and Wasabi both charge around $5/TB and that's really the table-stakes price. For the more DIY-inclined, Hetzner sells a 2TB OwnCloud instance for 9.90€/month.
I'd prefer to buy software from you than storage. It's out of the question for me to pay you per TB but I'd consider paying a flat rate for software I then host myself.
I fully agree. It's a hard sell getting people to switch from an evil but known cloud provider to an unknown cloud provider that claims to not be evil.
What we do not need is more cloud offerings that can change, vanish or lock us out at the blink of an algorithm's eye.
What we need, rather, are reliable and easy-to-use solutions that allow us to retain full control of our data (i.e. self-hosted and offline) while having feature parity with the big cloud-only solutions.
I for one am convinced that there is plenty of money to be made that way. Perhaps not as much on autopilot as with the quasi-scam that is cloud computing, but people willingly paid hundreds or thousands for software before clouds and subscriptions. People will do so again, if you bring a convincing, unique or competitive product to market.
That being said, I like, appreciate and support this project for its impetus, even though I think its distribution strategy is misguided and fad-driven (re-selling cloud space instead of selling software). It's not too late to change that...
Hey, so the project had initially started off as a self-hostable software (with an option to buy a pre-configured device). We realized soon that it's hard to monetize such a product in the consumer space to the point where it can become self-sustaining.
We don't have a problem with offering a self-hosted variant. But given our limited engineering bandwidth we had to take a call on who our target market should be, and we felt that it was more important to make privacy accessible to people like my mom and dad. Hence this direction.
> We realized soon that it's hard to monetize such [self-hosted product]
Spot on. We iterated on a similar product in this space: "privacy preserving", "self-hosted", "open source" etc. But focused on local AI indexing & search of personal videos and photos [0], rather than backups.
We ultimately shelved VideoNinja because we weren't able to find a sustainable business angle:
* Non-technical people simply don't care (happy locked into Apple / Google).
* Technical people understood the proposition, but are super stingy. Case in point, see the responses in this very thread: "$10 per year max; I can buy a HDD for less!". That's one (cheap) restaurant meal per year.
So I fully understand your decision to go "cloud". Although that immediately takes your product off the table for me personally. I want nothing of mine (of value) in the cloud.
I feel there must be a way to square that circle, the market exists.
[0] https://video-ninja.com/
11 replies →
I get the decision but I think it misses part of the problem: how do you convince people like your mum and dad to start paying for backups and how do you convince them to pay extra for privacy?
I suspect the way it usually happens is that somebody your parents trust (like you) tells them to sign up for a privacy-preserving backup service.
But who's going to tell them to do that? Do you have the money to pay for advertising?
Normally, I'd suspect it's the tech-savvy younger folks who'd tell them to buy something like this but with your pricing and lack of self-hosted options, I suspect you've alienated a large portion of the tech-savvy audience you need to advocate for your product.
5 replies →
Can I suggest adding pricing tier(s) between 100GB and 1000GB? I have between 100gb and 200gb of photos, and £14.99/month seems like a lot considering I only pay £2.49/month for google storage. I'd definitely consider paying a premium for this service, but not 6x.
11 replies →
What about Google photos is evil? I don't get it.
Okay it's easy to downvote, but I'll elaborate instead. First of all Google is trainihg AI models on your data and also able to create shadow profiles for people including those who decide against using Google services.
They also used dark pattern on Android for years by enabling cloud sync by default for everything. So a lot of people got all their photos uploaded while they had no idea about feature.
So it's not any different from Facebook that constantly tried to collect as much data on you as possible. Do you know what is evil about facebook?
5 replies →
The other day I sent out a link made with Google Photos' "create link" function. That's not a share to another user, just a link that anyone can open, no Google account required. But one person showed me that hitting that link on her phone, Google wanted to authenticate her before showing the picture.
That is utterly unacceptable.
4 replies →
Yeah, if you are client-side encrypted, where you choose to host doesn't really matter because even with a warrant there is nothing you could do to recover data, so why not go for something like Wasabi?
I can pay for a terabyte of Amazon Glacier for $50/year. Amazon Deep Glacier is $12 per month.
$300/year for 2TB isn't happening. I can buy a 12TB HDD for less, if I shop around.
I'd like a service like this to keep small, well-compressed 1080p or 4k photos available for instant access, and original files in archival storage of some kind.
I'm totally glad to pay the $10/year for the baseline service, and another $12 for deep glacier costs. I'm not glad to pay thousands of dollars for a service like this over the lifetime of my photos. I'm not quite sure where the line between that is.
I'll also mention: open-source, data export, and the option of self-hosting is helpful. I don't want to spin up an EC2 instance for this when I can buy $12, but if you go out-of-business, I'd like to have the option. Could also be an option you only guarantee if the service is discontinued or has substantially different costs/terms.
> I can pay for a terabyte of Amazon Glacier for $50/year. Amazon Deep Glacier is $12 per month.
You can pay even less to store that data in /dev/null. To make a more realistic comparison you should also include data retrieval & data transfer costs. Reading a terabyte from those services costs around $100.
I can think of close to zero times when I would need my full photo collection, in full resolution, all at once. In most cases, for showing photos, even 1080p highly-compressed is fine. In rare cases, I want to edit an old photo, and I want the original RAW file in full color depth and resolution.
With Amazon and Google you’re paying half in monthly fees and half with your mineable data. This service seems geared towards people who don’t want that.
Rolling your own on top of a cloud storage provider is great too but for an incremental $100-$200/year some people would pay for something that “just works”.