7 ms·

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

by Youden 5y 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.

imagine99 5y ago
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...
- vishnumohandas 5y ago
  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.
  - Youden 5y ago
    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.
    - pininja 5y ago
      If their service works well and is convenient to use, I’ll be recommending it by word of mouth. In the case of my parents, if I can finally consolidate and de-duplicate the photos from our 3+ Apple Photos collections by pointing the service at “library” folders from a few computers and devices, I’ll be a big fan.
    - vishnumohandas 5y ago
      > how do you convince them to pay extra for privacy? We are hopeful that we will be able to reduce the pricing as we scale up and hit a critical mass. > who's going to tell them to do that? We plan to implement a referral program, similar to what Dropbox did, to incentivize existing customers to spread the word. That said, you do bring up interesting points. To repeat, we aren't averse to the idea of maintaining a self-hosted variant. Just that due to our limited bandwidth we had to choose one direction over another. Having advocates is important and I suppose with time we will have clarity on how to best do this without stretching ourselves too thin.
      - Z_I_F_F 5y ago
        I really hope the self-hosted option becomes a thing, but unfortunately "we are not averse to the idea" means especially little in the tech world these days. That being said, really really hoping for your success! It finally fills a MUCH needed gap in 2021 consumer image viewing software. There are many many gaps in it right now. Synology is basically the only self-hosted photo solution that grandma could use. Honestly surprised that more people aren't taking advantage of the opportunity.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  What about Google photos is evil? I don't get it.
  - SXX 5y ago
    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?
    - missedthecue 5y ago
      I don't really get what's evil about AI models and cloud sync. And I don't think anything is wrong about Facebook's business model. I think most people are uninformed about it and believe that they sell personal data, but if you understand the way they make money, it's very difficult to say that there is any particular issue with it.
      - istingray 5y ago
        Ah, what you really meant was "what's evil about selling my data?" which is a much larger question. And it sounds like you already have your answer.
        fomine3 5y ago
        They actually don't "sell".
        krageon 5y ago
        They take your data and turn it into something that has value to them. With actual selling, that something is money. In this case it could be something else, but saying it that way will not help the general discourse of this problem at all. Much like being pedantic over terminology.
sam0x17 5y ago
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?
woofie11 5y ago
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.
- Strom 5y ago
  > 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.
  - woofie11 5y ago
    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.
mrobins 5y ago
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”.

by Youden 5y ago

imagine99 5y ago

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...

vishnumohandas 5y ago
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.
- Youden 5y ago
  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.
  - pininja 5y ago
    If their service works well and is convenient to use, I’ll be recommending it by word of mouth. In the case of my parents, if I can finally consolidate and de-duplicate the photos from our 3+ Apple Photos collections by pointing the service at “library” folders from a few computers and devices, I’ll be a big fan.
  - vishnumohandas 5y ago
    > how do you convince them to pay extra for privacy? We are hopeful that we will be able to reduce the pricing as we scale up and hit a critical mass. > who's going to tell them to do that? We plan to implement a referral program, similar to what Dropbox did, to incentivize existing customers to spread the word. That said, you do bring up interesting points. To repeat, we aren't averse to the idea of maintaining a self-hosted variant. Just that due to our limited bandwidth we had to choose one direction over another. Having advocates is important and I suppose with time we will have clarity on how to best do this without stretching ourselves too thin.
    - Z_I_F_F 5y ago
      I really hope the self-hosted option becomes a thing, but unfortunately "we are not averse to the idea" means especially little in the tech world these days. That being said, really really hoping for your success! It finally fills a MUCH needed gap in 2021 consumer image viewing software. There are many many gaps in it right now. Synology is basically the only self-hosted photo solution that grandma could use. Honestly surprised that more people aren't taking advantage of the opportunity.
missedthecue 5y ago
What about Google photos is evil? I don't get it.
- SXX 5y ago
  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?
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    I don't really get what's evil about AI models and cloud sync. And I don't think anything is wrong about Facebook's business model. I think most people are uninformed about it and believe that they sell personal data, but if you understand the way they make money, it's very difficult to say that there is any particular issue with it.
    - istingray 5y ago
      Ah, what you really meant was "what's evil about selling my data?" which is a much larger question. And it sounds like you already have your answer.
      - fomine3 5y ago
        They actually don't "sell".
        krageon 5y ago
        They take your data and turn it into something that has value to them. With actual selling, that something is money. In this case it could be something else, but saying it that way will not help the general discourse of this problem at all. Much like being pedantic over terminology.

sam0x17 5y ago

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?

woofie11 5y ago

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.

Strom 5y ago
> 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.
- woofie11 5y ago
  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.

mrobins 5y ago

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”.