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Comment by film42 | Hacker News Reader

This looks really cool. I'm a little concerned that "there is currently no pay model, and we're not trying to make money. We're testing a product right now, and we'd like to bring public keys to the masses." What's the harm in charging $5/month for 50GB as a beta service that might not last forever to help fund development? Maybe even keep the same level but allow people to pledge monthly to support your efforts? It just always seems to be the case that there's a lot of runway until there isn't. Building a product and making money are not mutually exclusive.

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The harm is that $5 / month for 50GB is the wrong model.

If this is valuable, they think 10GB is enough to test the fundamental premise and see people hit the edges of what they'd want to pay for.

There might be a segment of the market for whom this is worth vastly more than $5 / month. There might be a segment who wants to pay that little, but it's not about storage. They may not learn these things by priming people on a per-GB storage model.

I agree. My point wasn't necessarily that they should charge for storage but more so allow the community to support them financially as they're working on their product(s). The post saying, "we're not collecting money, we're not trying to make money right now" just seems kind of strange. Keep the free model. Let people play around, but I still don't see harm in allowing someone from the community to pay keybase for working hard on a hard problem. I'd be more than happy to pay them right now just because I love the work they do and want them to succeed.

They should charge to get an enterprise version with certain guarantees. Without payment and a contractual guarantee, it can only ever be for personal use.

You say this, but we use it as a convienient way to onboard new engineers. There is a huge amount of key material to exchange to bring one of our developers online and its a lot easier to move it without thumb drives or passwords shouted across the room (or the famous email-tar.gpg and slack the password).

It's not reliable for storing customer data, no. But it's quite useful for a lot of quick engineering work.

That is basically 'personal' usage. You can't build that into any formal process, even for onboarding -- any day it may not work.

I also failed to mention that having an internal namespace for an organization may be relevant. People may not want to be public.

Neither seems terribly relevant, to be honest. In terms of namespacing, Corporations don't have their own space. What you do is have individuals send files amongst each other.

And, are you suggesting that a corporate process has to rely on technology that is always available? I'm fairly sure that they don't. If corporate Wi-Fi and Microsoft Office are any indication, anyways.

Please excuse any punctuation or capitalization today. I am training a new interface to Hacker News and the voice recognition sometimes produces slightly odd text.

But it may be too early to even offer that

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