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I'm so excited to finally be able to share this with you! Pantry is a free cloud storage service that I've been building for the past few weeks. You can use th

I'm so excited to finally be able to share this with you! Pantry is a free cloud storage service that I've been building for the past few weeks. You can use the API to store & retrieve data for you and your users online for free. Looking forward to seeing what you all think of it, and please feel free to post suggestions or AMA. Thanks!

1cvmask 6y ago
How will you pay for it if costs go up?
- fiveSpeedManual 6y ago
  Great question! I believe this is a good problem to have, and perhaps one day I'll be lucky enough to face this. I've spent some time thinking of how to monetize Pantry - perhaps a private tier, something that is more feature-rich?
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    One thing I'd express, is many people launch cool things without a monetization plan, become popular largely because their free, and then lose everything they built when they realize to monetize effectively they have to "alter the deal". Beware of Vadering your project: Figure out what you can charge for early, and never offer it for free.
    - fiveSpeedManual 6y ago
      Duly noted, this was an eye-opener. I suppose I should prioritize this while I still have time. Time to step away from the keyboard and think about the business side of this project. Oh, I did add a "BuyMeCoffee" button on the About page, but its more of a donation. - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/imRohan https://www.buymeacoffee.com/imRohan
      - conductr 6y ago
        I’d say don’t over think it and don’t quit your day job. But I also assume you’re not pouring money into this. Stay free as long as you can, it gives you data so build out some usage stats, talk to the highest volume users. Figure out what threshold they become willing to pay and how much. Then, ask them to pay because they might have just lied to you.
        fiveSpeedManual 6y ago
        Haha, yeah I'm definitely not quitting my day job over this, and you're right about the costs as well - Pantry is fairly cheap to maintain. I might keep it as a free service for the time being and do some research to see if there's value in a paid tier. Thanks!
  - jquast 6y ago
    I shared a free JSON API with parse.com with a bunch of friends to develop a set of FOSS CLI apps we communicated over. It was all open and fun and funny. Then parse.com shutdown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parse_(platform) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parse_(platform) -- What started out as fun project for several developers turned into a dead project for us all, which by then had hundreds of users around the world, who were now getting errors instead of fun. We all used different programming languages, nobody was able to re-engineer all of our clients into a new endpoint/api. My takeaway -- any one of us could have hosted the JSON api, but we made the mistake in thinking we would use a free 3rd party service. That decision killed the project.
whalesalad 6y ago
- How would you sell me on Pantry vs. AWS S3? (You can use S3 in much the same way ... throwing up JSON at a path and fetching it. The cost some would argue is neglible) - How do you deal with CORS? - How do you deal with authentication? Is this intended to be like the take a penny leave a penny jar? You put stuff here knowing anyone could come and destroy it at any time? I did not sign up, I am only going off your API docs.
- strogonoff 6y ago
  > How would you sell me on Pantry vs. AWS S3? Is this question really appropriate? The developer is sharing a pro bono offering, where does selling anyone on it against a commercial service even come into play? It looks like a project that must have been fun to make and could be useful for storing non-sensitive data with very little hassle. Long bucket IDs appear to leave little chance for name collision. If you are building a piece of software that deals with anything remotely like PII or has specific availability requirements, I sincerely hope this is not something you are seriously considering (otherwise, pardon me, I hope I won’t be your user or customer), starting from the fact that you aren’t paying for it and there is no SLA.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    "Sell me on X vs. Y." is a colloquialism. It's just a different way of asking "what are the benefits of X over Y."
    - strogonoff 6y ago
      We’re talking welcoming a stranger sharing the result of their work with “but what are the benefits of your free solution over megacorp Z’s paid offering Y?”.
      - whalesalad 6y ago
lidHanteyk 6y ago
What's your data integrity policy like? In particular, what's your privacy policy? What technical measures, if any, prevent misuse of uploaded data?
- fiveSpeedManual 6y ago
  Great question! Let me get back to you? You are right, and all of your points are valid. I will definitely be looking into drafting some documents revolving around data integrity and privacy. As for the prevention of misuse, I've added a data limit per basket and a limit of baskets per Pantry. If you have any ideas or suggestions - I'm all ears. Thanks!

1cvmask 6y ago

How will you pay for it if costs go up?

fiveSpeedManual 6y ago
Great question! I believe this is a good problem to have, and perhaps one day I'll be lucky enough to face this. I've spent some time thinking of how to monetize Pantry - perhaps a private tier, something that is more feature-rich?
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  One thing I'd express, is many people launch cool things without a monetization plan, become popular largely because their free, and then lose everything they built when they realize to monetize effectively they have to "alter the deal". Beware of Vadering your project: Figure out what you can charge for early, and never offer it for free.
  - fiveSpeedManual 6y ago
    Duly noted, this was an eye-opener. I suppose I should prioritize this while I still have time. Time to step away from the keyboard and think about the business side of this project. Oh, I did add a "BuyMeCoffee" button on the About page, but its more of a donation. - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/imRohan https://www.buymeacoffee.com/imRohan
    - conductr 6y ago
      I’d say don’t over think it and don’t quit your day job. But I also assume you’re not pouring money into this. Stay free as long as you can, it gives you data so build out some usage stats, talk to the highest volume users. Figure out what threshold they become willing to pay and how much. Then, ask them to pay because they might have just lied to you.
      - fiveSpeedManual 6y ago
        Haha, yeah I'm definitely not quitting my day job over this, and you're right about the costs as well - Pantry is fairly cheap to maintain. I might keep it as a free service for the time being and do some research to see if there's value in a paid tier. Thanks!
- jquast 6y ago
  I shared a free JSON API with parse.com with a bunch of friends to develop a set of FOSS CLI apps we communicated over. It was all open and fun and funny. Then parse.com shutdown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parse_(platform) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parse_(platform) -- What started out as fun project for several developers turned into a dead project for us all, which by then had hundreds of users around the world, who were now getting errors instead of fun. We all used different programming languages, nobody was able to re-engineer all of our clients into a new endpoint/api. My takeaway -- any one of us could have hosted the JSON api, but we made the mistake in thinking we would use a free 3rd party service. That decision killed the project.

whalesalad 6y ago

- How would you sell me on Pantry vs. AWS S3? (You can use S3 in much the same way ... throwing up JSON at a path and fetching it. The cost some would argue is neglible) - How do you deal with CORS? - How do you deal with authentication? Is this intended to be like the take a penny leave a penny jar? You put stuff here knowing anyone could come and destroy it at any time? I did not sign up, I am only going off your API docs.

strogonoff 6y ago
> How would you sell me on Pantry vs. AWS S3? Is this question really appropriate? The developer is sharing a pro bono offering, where does selling anyone on it against a commercial service even come into play? It looks like a project that must have been fun to make and could be useful for storing non-sensitive data with very little hassle. Long bucket IDs appear to leave little chance for name collision. If you are building a piece of software that deals with anything remotely like PII or has specific availability requirements, I sincerely hope this is not something you are seriously considering (otherwise, pardon me, I hope I won’t be your user or customer), starting from the fact that you aren’t paying for it and there is no SLA.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pmiller2 6y ago
  "Sell me on X vs. Y." is a colloquialism. It's just a different way of asking "what are the benefits of X over Y."
  - strogonoff 6y ago
    We’re talking welcoming a stranger sharing the result of their work with “but what are the benefits of your free solution over megacorp Z’s paid offering Y?”.
    - whalesalad 6y ago

lidHanteyk 6y ago

What's your data integrity policy like? In particular, what's your privacy policy? What technical measures, if any, prevent misuse of uploaded data?

fiveSpeedManual 6y ago
Great question! Let me get back to you? You are right, and all of your points are valid. I will definitely be looking into drafting some documents revolving around data integrity and privacy. As for the prevention of misuse, I've added a data limit per basket and a limit of baskets per Pantry. If you have any ideas or suggestions - I'm all ears. Thanks!