3 ms·

I don't understand what the base price is supposed to cover... Why would I pay you $60/year to back up my files to thumb drives and friends' computers?

• mholt 8y ago
  That's the membership subscription: unlimited backups to local and remote (meaning "peer" or other computers) destinations, automatic software updates, and for as many devices as you have. Some backup services (especially those with unlimited offerings) limit you to just one or two computers. And your membership subscription can become free if you refer others each year (they also get a discount). 3 referrals per year will keep your membership totally free.
• cpach 8y ago
  ”Why would I pay you $60/year to back up my files to thumb drives and friends' computers?” Isn’t that kinda obvious? What you pay for is the ability for the developers to continue refining the application and keep adding useful features. Sounds reasonable to me at least.
  • WorldMaker 8y ago
    But it also leaves you susceptible to potential pivots in the business plan if the developers decide that base fee isn't enough or isn't generating enough income. The benefit to an ownership model in this case, particularly with "bring your own cloud" is that at least you have some immunity if the developers stop refining the application. This is more than just a hypothetical. One of the mentioned reasons for this application was the shutdown of CrashPlan for home users. Using a similar monthly fee plan doesn't show any more resilience than the service they are trying to replace. What's the likelihood that the same market realities that pushed CrashPlan to shut down such services don't also impact them? More personally anecdotally, I bought a "bring your own cloud" multi-cloud backup tool many years ago. I still use it, even through several terrible pivots, because the core software has been stable/consistent/well-enough maintained at the time. They were bought by a cloud provider and dropped "bring your own cloud" and "multi-cloud" from their main focused products. They spun back out and are trying to be business-focused SaaS-only similar to CrashPlan's recent pivot. Neither of those pivots have been to my advantage, but again, for now, the original desktop application I bought all those years ago still works great. Had I opted for one of the more monthly paid SaaS products in either of those pivots, I would have been much worse off with each pivot. Unfortunately, there's also no way that I can recommend people buy a product like mine because they no longer sell it in that manner (and haven't in years), and it's incredibly tough to avoid the SaaS business model in the backup space, but backup is one of the areas where such business models and safety from pivots is extremely important and the SaaS model seems almost to guarantee that pivots will happen.
    • mholt 8y ago
      We hear ya. We were bit the very example you mentioned, so to prevent that with our service: 1) We are currently adding a "bring your own cloud" feature to Relica -- in fact, it's already done, just undocumented while we finish up the UI for it. 2) Relica uses restic for the actual archival operations, so your restores can be performed with an independent, reliable, well-maintained, MIT-licensed open source tool.