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On the flipside of that I've seen patio11 specifically tell the tarsnap guy to charge more, while his product already costs $0.25/GB while GCP Cloud Storage Nea

On the flipside of that I've seen patio11 specifically tell the tarsnap guy to charge more, while his product already costs $0.25/GB while GCP Cloud Storage Nearline and S3 Infrequent Access are $0.01/GB (and falling each year). When I was recently looking at backup solutions I immediately discounted tarsnap due to the pricing.

tomkarlo 9y ago
That doesn't mean it's the wrong pricing, just that you're maybe not the customer they want. A business loses some customers at any pricing level, it's just a question of whether the incremental revenue from the remaining customers makes up for it. When you charge a penny extra, that's all incremental margin from the customers you keep, but for the customers you lose, some of lost revenue is balanced by not having the costs associated with supporting them any more. Pushing the most price sensitive customers out the door isn't that bad, because they're also likely to be the least loyal down the road, and maybe the highest maintenance relative to their spend.
- jacobr1 9y ago
  Only if the product is competitively differentiated. If your product is a commodity you to find a value-add or niche. Then you can charge a premium.
- ad_hominem 9y ago
  Sure, that's a good point especially considering he's a one-man show so it probably makes sense to keep the user base as ruthlessly small as possible just for support reasons alone. It does make me curious though who the target customer is - somebody who's comfortable setting up a Unix CLI tool for their backups (creating a cron job etc.), yet who wants to cede bucket ownership to a 3rd party and pay a 25x markup for the pleasure? I personally don't mind having to click "Create Bucket" in the AWS console if I get to pay $3/mo instead of $75/mo on my 300GB of data. shrugs
  - tomkarlo 9y ago
    If that customer exists - they sound like a great customer. $75 a month might be too expensive for your needs, but it's certainly not a ton of money if someone believes that product is the right fit for them.
  - zeroxfe 9y ago
    But Tarsnap is much more than that -- it deduplicates, it encrypts, it has settings for restricting network, memory, and CPU usage, it caches and checkpoints, etc. I'm happy to pay the premium for the robustness I get from it.
    - ad_hominem 9y ago
      Glad you're happy with it. I went with BorgBackup which I'm also happy with. AFAIK it also does dedupe, encrypt, checkpointing, and can throttle upload speed (don't know about the rest).
      - MarkMc 9y ago
        One of the things I value about Tarsnap is that I can set a permission which does not allow data to be deleted. That is, if a hacker somehow gains access to my server, she cannot delete all the existing backups. More generally, I suspect you are underestimating the number of people who tick one or more of these boxes: (a) Impressed by Colin's security chops and the security focus of Tarsnap such as its Bug Bounty program; (b) Have never heard of BorgBackup; (c) Value customer support; (d) Are worried that an open-source project would not be maintained and prefer a vendor whose livelihood depends on the product (d) Have experience with Tarsnap on previous projects; (e) Only need to store 20 Gb and for whom saving $5 per month is unimportant; (f) Have revenue in the millions and for whom $75 per month is a rounding error. Even if there were no such people and Tarsnap's new user growth was zero, it might still make sense for Colin to triple the price of Tarsnap in order to maximise the income from existing users.
        ad_hominem 9y ago
sreitshamer 9y ago
Maybe that just means you're not the target market.
samstave 9y ago
To force the other replies to explain themselves: What is the target market for Tarsnap vs G/A; what do they offer at that higher cost that their target market wants? or is their target market simply the ignorant-to-storage-costs-CIOs/IT-departments?
- tomkarlo 9y ago
  Seems like they're pretty up front about that, right on their home page: "Online backups for the truly paranoid." We can argue about whether that really differentiates them from GCP etc, but that's their spin.
- kasey_junk 9y ago
  It’s at least partially cperciva’s reputation. Also the tarsnap feature set and security model. The hyper unixy approach is valuable to some as well.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tptacek 9y ago
You aren't getting anything resembling Tarsnap's security from S3 or GCP. If you don't care about security (and for some data sets, you totally don't!), you're right, it doesn't make sense to use Tarsnap.
- ad_hominem 9y ago
  I'm not rsyncing plaintext data to S3/GCP, I'm using BorgBackup to encrypt and dedupe it. I don't know if the encryption is comparable between the two (they both appear to use AES-256 and HMAC-SHA256), but I imagine tarsnap's is slightly more clever?
patio11 9y ago
You're paying $0.01 to give your GB to Amazon and $0.24 to make it impossible for Amazon to give it to anyone else. If you don't care about Amazon giving your data to anyone else, then you don't have to pay the premium for Tarsnap. There are plenty of data sets for which that is reasonable. There are plenty of data sets, perhaps not at your shop, where $0.24 laughs in the general direction of the value of a gigabyte. I previously used Tarsnap at a HIPAA-regulated SaaS app. The fines for unplanned disclosure are measured per-record not per gigabyte; my rough guesstimate on proration is $12 million / GB but what's an order of magnitude or three between friends.
- shostack 9y ago
  "What are you really paying for?" is a great question to ask for any product or service. An even greater one to answer if you are the one marketing said product or service.
- ad_hominem 9y ago
  But it doesn't cost $0.24 to make it impossible for Amazon to give it to anyone else. I'm using BorgBackup to encrypt my data, and it appears to use the same AES-256 and HMAC-SHA256 algorithms as tarsnap. There are a plethora of open source backup software that will encrypt your data and not charge you monthly for it.
  - kasey_junk 9y ago
    So the easiest way to describe that 0.24 is 'you get the support of one of the best people in the world at file security'. I'll get that might not be attractive to you. You are likely not a good customer for him. To me, it takes a lot of data and not much amount of my time to make that value proposition waaaaay worth it.
    - ad_hominem 9y ago
      That's a good way of putting it. I wish I were at a place in my life where the difference between $3/mo and $75/mo ($36/year vs $900/year) is a non-issue, but unfortunately I'm not. So for now my family photos and videos will have to be securely stored with the (probably) slightly sub-par designs of the open source software I'm using.
sudhirj 9y ago
This is actually classic patio11 paradigm shift. The point is that nobody (who actually makes business decisions) gives a shit about the per GB cost of backups. The shift that Tarsnap needs to look at is this: how much is the company willing to pay to never lose this data X probability of data loss without Tarsnap. And then subject that number to a ceiling of hiring competent (this is very important work) developers to replicate Tarsnap. Take that amount that companies would be willing to pay, and then divide by the actual size of the data. A company with 1TB of super valuable data will likely be willing to pay at least $X000 a year to have it safeguarded, which is really $X per month per GB.

tomkarlo 9y ago

That doesn't mean it's the wrong pricing, just that you're maybe not the customer they want. A business loses some customers at any pricing level, it's just a question of whether the incremental revenue from the remaining customers makes up for it. When you charge a penny extra, that's all incremental margin from the customers you keep, but for the customers you lose, some of lost revenue is balanced by not having the costs associated with supporting them any more. Pushing the most price sensitive customers out the door isn't that bad, because they're also likely to be the least loyal down the road, and maybe the highest maintenance relative to their spend.

jacobr1 9y ago
Only if the product is competitively differentiated. If your product is a commodity you to find a value-add or niche. Then you can charge a premium.
ad_hominem 9y ago
Sure, that's a good point especially considering he's a one-man show so it probably makes sense to keep the user base as ruthlessly small as possible just for support reasons alone. It does make me curious though who the target customer is - somebody who's comfortable setting up a Unix CLI tool for their backups (creating a cron job etc.), yet who wants to cede bucket ownership to a 3rd party and pay a 25x markup for the pleasure? I personally don't mind having to click "Create Bucket" in the AWS console if I get to pay $3/mo instead of $75/mo on my 300GB of data. shrugs
- tomkarlo 9y ago
  If that customer exists - they sound like a great customer. $75 a month might be too expensive for your needs, but it's certainly not a ton of money if someone believes that product is the right fit for them.
- zeroxfe 9y ago
  But Tarsnap is much more than that -- it deduplicates, it encrypts, it has settings for restricting network, memory, and CPU usage, it caches and checkpoints, etc. I'm happy to pay the premium for the robustness I get from it.
  - ad_hominem 9y ago
    Glad you're happy with it. I went with BorgBackup which I'm also happy with. AFAIK it also does dedupe, encrypt, checkpointing, and can throttle upload speed (don't know about the rest).
    - MarkMc 9y ago
      One of the things I value about Tarsnap is that I can set a permission which does not allow data to be deleted. That is, if a hacker somehow gains access to my server, she cannot delete all the existing backups. More generally, I suspect you are underestimating the number of people who tick one or more of these boxes: (a) Impressed by Colin's security chops and the security focus of Tarsnap such as its Bug Bounty program; (b) Have never heard of BorgBackup; (c) Value customer support; (d) Are worried that an open-source project would not be maintained and prefer a vendor whose livelihood depends on the product (d) Have experience with Tarsnap on previous projects; (e) Only need to store 20 Gb and for whom saving $5 per month is unimportant; (f) Have revenue in the millions and for whom $75 per month is a rounding error. Even if there were no such people and Tarsnap's new user growth was zero, it might still make sense for Colin to triple the price of Tarsnap in order to maximise the income from existing users.
      - ad_hominem 9y ago

sreitshamer 9y ago

Maybe that just means you're not the target market.

samstave 9y ago

To force the other replies to explain themselves: What is the target market for Tarsnap vs G/A; what do they offer at that higher cost that their target market wants? or is their target market simply the ignorant-to-storage-costs-CIOs/IT-departments?

tomkarlo 9y ago
Seems like they're pretty up front about that, right on their home page: "Online backups for the truly paranoid." We can argue about whether that really differentiates them from GCP etc, but that's their spin.
kasey_junk 9y ago
It’s at least partially cperciva’s reputation. Also the tarsnap feature set and security model. The hyper unixy approach is valuable to some as well.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

tptacek 9y ago

You aren't getting anything resembling Tarsnap's security from S3 or GCP. If you don't care about security (and for some data sets, you totally don't!), you're right, it doesn't make sense to use Tarsnap.

ad_hominem 9y ago
I'm not rsyncing plaintext data to S3/GCP, I'm using BorgBackup to encrypt and dedupe it. I don't know if the encryption is comparable between the two (they both appear to use AES-256 and HMAC-SHA256), but I imagine tarsnap's is slightly more clever?

patio11 9y ago

You're paying $0.01 to give your GB to Amazon and $0.24 to make it impossible for Amazon to give it to anyone else. If you don't care about Amazon giving your data to anyone else, then you don't have to pay the premium for Tarsnap. There are plenty of data sets for which that is reasonable. There are plenty of data sets, perhaps not at your shop, where $0.24 laughs in the general direction of the value of a gigabyte. I previously used Tarsnap at a HIPAA-regulated SaaS app. The fines for unplanned disclosure are measured per-record not per gigabyte; my rough guesstimate on proration is $12 million / GB but what's an order of magnitude or three between friends.

shostack 9y ago
"What are you really paying for?" is a great question to ask for any product or service. An even greater one to answer if you are the one marketing said product or service.
ad_hominem 9y ago
But it doesn't cost $0.24 to make it impossible for Amazon to give it to anyone else. I'm using BorgBackup to encrypt my data, and it appears to use the same AES-256 and HMAC-SHA256 algorithms as tarsnap. There are a plethora of open source backup software that will encrypt your data and not charge you monthly for it.
- kasey_junk 9y ago
  So the easiest way to describe that 0.24 is 'you get the support of one of the best people in the world at file security'. I'll get that might not be attractive to you. You are likely not a good customer for him. To me, it takes a lot of data and not much amount of my time to make that value proposition waaaaay worth it.
  - ad_hominem 9y ago
    That's a good way of putting it. I wish I were at a place in my life where the difference between $3/mo and $75/mo ($36/year vs $900/year) is a non-issue, but unfortunately I'm not. So for now my family photos and videos will have to be securely stored with the (probably) slightly sub-par designs of the open source software I'm using.

sudhirj 9y ago

This is actually classic patio11 paradigm shift. The point is that nobody (who actually makes business decisions) gives a shit about the per GB cost of backups. The shift that Tarsnap needs to look at is this: how much is the company willing to pay to never lose this data X probability of data loss without Tarsnap. And then subject that number to a ceiling of hiring competent (this is very important work) developers to replicate Tarsnap. Take that amount that companies would be willing to pay, and then divide by the actual size of the data. A company with 1TB of super valuable data will likely be willing to pay at least $X000 a year to have it safeguarded, which is really $X per month per GB.