This is partly the micropayment problem. The other way around it is to extend credit, and bill people. I can see this is against your profitability rule. Just s

This is partly the micropayment problem. The other way around it is to extend credit, and bill people. I can see this is against your profitability rule. Just saying it's another solution, in general. You didn't ask for feedback, so feel free to ignore the following :-) It would be nice to have a demo service, to play with before paying the $5. You could limit it to a trivial amount of storage (like 100 bytes) - the purpose is not to store stuff, but to have a play. An easier on-ramp helps adoption, gives people a chance to kick the tyres. If your account stays below zero, your backups will be deleted. This is a bit scary for a backup service. I'm sure you haven't actually deleted anything, but it would be reassuring if you gave a schedule, e.g. emails every day for a month (perhaps mimic the warnings of a domain name registrar). The main thing is to reassure people, by communicating what you will do before deleting their stuff. One warning about "a service that you would use". A multinational corporation has different values from an individual, and they will happily pay more than you can imagine, if you can solve their problems. I guess this doesn't apply to you, because bigger customers would setup their own backup, instead of using your service (as you say). I'm just saying that your own sense of value doesn't always translate to different needs - unless you can imagine yourself as a multinational corp, I guess. :-)