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Is Tarsnap going to drop prices in response to the AWS S3 drop?

by datr 13y ago

blairbeckwith 13y ago
Gosh, I hope not. If anything, they should raise their prices.
sexmonad 13y ago
This is my question too. Tarsnap is cool, and Colin deserves to get paid for his hard work, but the cost differential is far too much for me to use tarsnap right now. If they cut their costs in half, I'd be able to afford to use them over raw S3.
- spindritf 13y ago
  Tarsnap's deduplication makes it even cheaper than it would seem. Considering what you're buying, Tarsnap is already ridiculously underpriced.
  - wmf 13y ago
    Is tarsnap's dedupe any better than bup or obnam? The competition has not stood still since tarsnap came out.
cperciva 13y ago
I've been busy with bitcoin for the past few days -- I need to crunch some numbers on my AWS bills to see how much money this saves me; it's not as obvious as it sounds once GET/PUT costs and EC2 costs (which are mostly reserved instances, thus not affected by this price cut) are factored in. But my first guess is that a price cut is very likely to be coming. ;-)
- icelancer 13y ago
  Please don't. Just pocket the margin. The prices should have gone up, anyway.
  - skrause 13y ago
    Why?
    - gburt 13y ago
      Tarsnap is extremely low cost as it is for the service it offers. Edit: in most HNers opinion.
      - geoffc 13y ago
        Agreed! I use a lot of Saas services and tarsnap is insanely cheap for the value it provides. While I'm at it, a feature I would love to see in tarsnap is server side pruning of old archives so I can remove the delete permissions from my production keys and not have to setup a secondary pruning server.
        cperciva 13y ago
        server side pruning of old archives That's not possible -- the service doesn't know which old blocks are being reused in new archives.
  - wheels 13y ago
    This is something that's repeated here, but I have a feeling mostly by folks that are backing up small amounts of mostly static data. Even after de-duplication and compression, my company stores about 400 GB of data with Tarsnap. Tarsnap is a double digit percentage of our monthly infrastructure costs. I think, perhaps, it's rather that the value that a business backing up a 30 MB database every day gets isn't radically different from the value that we get backing up several orders of magnitude more than that. The question really is if straight utility pricing makes sense. I could imagine that a floor on the pricing, or a non-linear curve would probably do better than simply keeping the same model and raising the prices. There's also a question of distribution of total revenue -- if the revenue for the small accounts was increased by 10x, would it balance out a 50% loss of large accounts?

Is Tarsnap going to drop prices in response to the AWS S3 drop?

by datr 13y ago

Is Tarsnap going to drop prices in response to the AWS S3 drop?

blairbeckwith 13y ago

Gosh, I hope not. If anything, they should raise their prices.

sexmonad 13y ago

This is my question too. Tarsnap is cool, and Colin deserves to get paid for his hard work, but the cost differential is far too much for me to use tarsnap right now. If they cut their costs in half, I'd be able to afford to use them over raw S3.

spindritf 13y ago
Tarsnap's deduplication makes it even cheaper than it would seem. Considering what you're buying, Tarsnap is already ridiculously underpriced.
- wmf 13y ago
  Is tarsnap's dedupe any better than bup or obnam? The competition has not stood still since tarsnap came out.

cperciva 13y ago

I've been busy with bitcoin for the past few days -- I need to crunch some numbers on my AWS bills to see how much money this saves me; it's not as obvious as it sounds once GET/PUT costs and EC2 costs (which are mostly reserved instances, thus not affected by this price cut) are factored in. But my first guess is that a price cut is very likely to be coming. ;-)

icelancer 13y ago
Please don't. Just pocket the margin. The prices should have gone up, anyway.
- skrause 13y ago
  Why?
  - gburt 13y ago
    Tarsnap is extremely low cost as it is for the service it offers. Edit: in most HNers opinion.
    - geoffc 13y ago
      Agreed! I use a lot of Saas services and tarsnap is insanely cheap for the value it provides. While I'm at it, a feature I would love to see in tarsnap is server side pruning of old archives so I can remove the delete permissions from my production keys and not have to setup a secondary pruning server.
      - cperciva 13y ago
        server side pruning of old archives That's not possible -- the service doesn't know which old blocks are being reused in new archives.
- wheels 13y ago
  This is something that's repeated here, but I have a feeling mostly by folks that are backing up small amounts of mostly static data. Even after de-duplication and compression, my company stores about 400 GB of data with Tarsnap. Tarsnap is a double digit percentage of our monthly infrastructure costs. I think, perhaps, it's rather that the value that a business backing up a 30 MB database every day gets isn't radically different from the value that we get backing up several orders of magnitude more than that. The question really is if straight utility pricing makes sense. I could imagine that a floor on the pricing, or a non-linear curve would probably do better than simply keeping the same model and raising the prices. There's also a question of distribution of total revenue -- if the revenue for the small accounts was increased by 10x, would it balance out a 50% loss of large accounts?