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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

$15 is ridiculously cheap. Don't even get me started for businesses: $15 pays for a third of the cab fare for your consultant to get from the airport to your office. For a revenue generating app it is a no brainer.

$150 is not much for a person to be spending on ten identifiable line items, either. Maybe if you only know poor college studentsr that sounds like a lot of money. For a middle class family, that sounds like a cable bill. If your service is in the top five most important things for mom in her life, price in two digits is irrelevant. She spends more on shampoo, hair care, feminine hygiene, paper, magazines, romance novels, etc, etc.

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I see both sides of this.

On the one hand: I have subscription fatigue. I've reached a point at which I'm hestitating to use services because the number of current $10-$20 subscriptions I have no longer fits in L1 cache and it often isn't worth it to me to evict cache lines to figure out what I'm spending --- and so I bounce.

On the other hand, next to the cost of having employees, my rational brain knows I can't possibly be spending real dollars on these things. Put in perspective: every Matasano employee has an Amazon account for which they can buy any book they want ever --- we even have a rule that says "don't worry if someone else bought the book, if you want the book it's yours and you keep it and you can share if you want to but don't worry about it" so that people won't waste time coordinating books instead of just getting what they want and getting back to work. This policy, which we concluded won't cost us "real" money ever, is much more expensive than all my $10-$20 subs ever will be.

But the subscriptions "feel" more expensive.

The answer to the original poster's question is: these things cost $10-$20 because the people running the service feel like they will generate approx. $10-$20 worth of value, and those are the terms under which being in business to generate that kind of value makes sense. In many cases, if the service actually turns out to be worth $3/user, they'll shutter it and pick something better to work on.

Your amazon policy is quite amazing. I figure that goes only for 'job related' books? Or any book at all?

It's not amazing. It benefits Matasano more than it benefits any individual team members. It would be ridiculous not to have the policy; people would deliver crappier work for clients and waste everyone's time bugging us for books. In the worst case, one of the managers might get a bug up their ass and start thinking about what books people should get; calamity!

There are a very few conditions:

## Terms and Conditions

### Limits

This benefit includes no stated specific limit on the number of books you can acquire or the subject matter they involve. We'd like to keep the policy as simple as possible. Our only request is: please intend to read or use whichever books you acquire. If you think you'll want a book on Clojure programming 6 months from now, consider waiting a couple months before getting it.

### Multiple Copies

Please do not obtain more than one copy of the same title, unless you've lost or somehow destroyed your first copy.

### Ownership and Sharing

When you get a book under this benefit, it's your book. It belongs to you.

At the same time, we hope books acquired under this benefit will help build an office library. If you're not using a book, please give it a home in the office library.

We'll provide a wiki page to register what books are available in the library, so you can easily tell whether you should look for a title in the office or go ahead and order it.

If you know the library has a copy of something you want, please use the library copy until you're sure you need to own your own copy. We are not asking everyone to share a single copy of the IDA Pro book, but we also don't want to buy 10 copies of "Designing BSD Rootkits".

### Crazy Ridiculous Books

Please do not use this benefit to try to acquire collector copies of first-edition signed Knuth prints that cost $1000, or, for that matter, to acquire professional books (like ANSI standards) that cost hundreds of dollars. If you need a book that costs hundreds of dollars, use "How Do I Get Books" option 3 and talk to Cory or Dave; we'll figure something out.

---

Nothing in there says you can't use this policy to buy Denis Johnson's _Tree of Smoke_ to read on the train. Nobody has, but if someone did I'd probably just smile.

Super cool... really!

About how much does this actually end up costing/employee? And how many actually take advantage?

I honestly don't look that closely; I just know what the final number is, and it's not a big deal. From the volume of Amazon traffic coming to our office, my sense is that everyone takes advantage.

Does that mean you can't use it to buy the Myhrvold cooking bible?

Shut up. Shut up. Shut. Up. :P

In my sleep deprived state I was thinking you wrote Monsanto...I was trying to justify my dislike of the company with how much I liked this policy, including the amiable words used in the policy!

Glad to see I was mistaken :)

Yes Monsanto hired tptacek to make sure the DNA of their seeds was well encrypted and secure from unauthorized access. :)

I love the spirit of these conditions and the policy in general, but I can't help but think a leaf could be taken from Nordstrom's book in turning the policy into a one-liner:

"Use your best judgment at all times."

Actually, by spelling things out, we aim to make people feel more comfortable ordering books: it's clear that we've thought things out, and that there isn't some "mistake" you're going to make ordering (say) a copy of K&R2 when there are already 2 copies in the office ("your book privileges are suspended, Peter!").

this is one of the company perks :D

Your Amazon policy is almost better than stock options and a 401k. I'd probably never willingly leave a company with that policy.

Seems like they are hiring - http://www.matasano.com/careers/

We are very, very hiring: NYC, Chicago, and SFBay.

I've got a couple more months where I am, but intend to move to SFBay area by years end. Will certainly check if you're still hiring then.

$15 is ridiculously cheap

For something you want, maybe. But a lot of these services fall into the category of "I might find it useful sometimes but I'm not sure" and most people aren't going to spend $15/month on something they're not sure they want.

The average Tarsnap revenue per user is about $3/month, and a large majority are less than that (yay lognormal distributions!) but I still work to convince people that it's worth spending that money.

Respectfully, Colin, but you price Tarsnap horribly. You run it like a public utility (a very complicated public utility) instead of a business.

You think this is a good thing, but it's not. Instead of setting a simple price based on what Tarsnap is worth to people --- a task that requires figuring out what Tarsnap is worth to different people and selecting the segment of the market that(a) you want to serve and (b) is sufficiently lucrative --- you have a fundamentally cost-based micro-metering structure that almost certainly radically undercharges most of your users.

You may think you're doing your users a favor by letting them off easy. But you're not. If Tarsnap is worth $11/mo to most of your users (hint: it is) and you charge $10/mo, you're generating value for them. But instead of doing that, you charge them almost nothing, and as a result are much more limited in what you can do for them. Last I checked, you were consulting instead of full-timing Tarsnap.

If you charged more, you could afford to:

* Radically overhaul your website and educate users about what secure backup actually means

* Commission a better user interface for people who you'd like to offer secure backup to but can't because they're not going to use a Unix command-line tool

* Implement more and better features on the backend of your system for tracking data, scheduling backups, backing up different kinds of data, and whatnot

This is all apart from the obvious point that your micro-metered pricing scheme is a Mensa test that almost makes fun of people's attempts to figure out what your service costs. Yes, the fact that it costs much too little means the joke is on you, but that doesn't really take the sting out of it for your prospective customers.

As always, Thomas, I value your feedback even though I'm not going to take your advice. :-)

Just to set the record straight on one point, though:

Last I checked, you were consulting instead of full-timing Tarsnap.

Yes, I do consulting, but it's a very small fraction of my time. And honestly, I think what I learn from the consulting is worth far more than the money I get.

I'm glad you're consulting. I hope you consult a lot more, so you'll come around to my way of thinking on the futility of advising generalist devs on writing crypto primitives. So look at it this way: if you'd stop running Tarsnap like a subsidized metered utility, you could hire someone to compensate for your weak spots.

It is, as Patrick will testify after many an evening conversation in Chicago, "all love" with you & me & these critiques. Your project should be epic by now, and it's driving me a little crazy.

I ran the numbers a while ago on using Tarsnap for our business and it's not as cheap as you make it out to be.

That only makes his pricing model worse, not better. He's doing $3/user (ie: not enough) and managing to chase off serious users by forcing them to think carefully about the pricing.

Here is a hint, Colin: any time a prospect says he's "run the numbers" on your pricing, you just received a strong signal that you need to simplify pricing. Purchasing decisions should be made in the limbic system.

Think about it: if you charged $5/mo and put an obscenely high cap on storage for the $5/mo account, then by your own math you'd be hugely improving your revenue, and at the same time you'd be charging half of this original poster's pain threshold number --- which is referring not to crazy encrypted backup solutions but to things like to-do lists!

At EnterAct, the ISP I ran tech-ops for, my old boss Mike Cloran came up with what he called the "5/30" pricing scheme, which we used to great effect to grab customers from other ISPs. Other ISPs were either metered (which scared the shit out subscribers) or flat-rate (which chased away light-users). The 5/30 plan was: $5/mo + $1/hour, capped at $30.

This is actually not a great deal and it is not particularly sophisticated (it is... wait for it... a capped metered plan). But it simplified the buying decision for people, addressed their perceived risks, and made EnterAct seem even more flexible than it already was.

Pricing is the hardest part of product marketing. There's a reason why established companies don't let just anyone do it. Your pricing scheme punts on it.

Think about it: if you charged $5/mo and put an obscenely high cap on storage for the $5/mo account, then by your own math you'd be hugely improving your revenue [...]

... and also hugely increasing my costs. With all due respect, I've talked to a lot more Tarsnap users than you have, Thomas, and I also have the advantage of seeing how much data people upload and how much they delete.

Your suggested pricing model would result in people uploading far more data and never deleting any of it, and would very rapidly move Tarsnap from "profitable" to "bankrupt".

Then lower the cap. Or do what Mozy does, and charge $5/mo + $1/mo/g (they charge 0.50/mo/gig, but with no Tarsnap sauce).

If Mozy can charge 0.50/mo/gig, 0.30/mo/gig is way too cheap.

I think a big part of the reason underlying why I can't afford it is that it uses amazon for the storage, and that is already quite a fee for large amounts of data even before the tarsnap markup.

The security is of lesser consideration for me, the convenience was the main selling point.

Congratulations, Colin. Your pricing model has people thinking about your service in terms of "a markup over Amazon S3". =)

Personally I think of it as a value added markup as a good thing.

Using S3 would cost me more per month unless I implemented a similar system to tarsnap.

Seeing how Amazon's whole business model is basically to commoditize storage (and cycles and database queries) and drive prices as low as possible, their price per gigabyte seems like a very dangerous star for Colin to hitch his wagon to.

I'm sure you think me crazy, but that's what I was aiming for. I want people to be able to say, like _delirium and wwortiz did, "this is clearly a reasonable price because he's using S3 for backing storage and we know how much S3 costs".

A critical part of trust is transparency, and in the long term I think I'll do better by having transparent and obviously reasonable pricing than by obscuring things and trying to maximize my (short-term) profits.

Exactly what does your cost of storage have to do with the value of the service you provide?

It doesn't. But people aren't rational -- they'll reject a good deal (including free money!) if they think the person offering the deal is making out better than they are.

I think you guys are just looking at value differently.

I didn't know about either of your companies but by the discussion, its clearly possible for Tarsnap users to derive value from the trust associated with transparency and feeling like their dollar is maximized. tptacek, pricing schemes aren't the only component of the purchase decision or profitability. His users are making a more emotional decision. cperciva should stick to the core of what his users are finding valuable...then get bought out and turn into an evil profit maximizing company

You know what? Newsflash to all the brilliant people trying to make a mint by playing S3 middlemen... You're one free-software client from being irrelevant. $10/month is enough to motivate me to hack in my spare time. At $3/month... meh, maybe I'll scratch a different itch.

Try to hack up a replacement to tarsnap in your spare time and you are a lot more likely to embarass yourself than to give Colin a run for his money. S3 isn't the underlying value in Tarsnap.

I haven't used Tarsnap, but it looks very similar to duplicity at a cursory glance. Are there many differences?

Yes: Tarsnap is extremely secure, and so it can be used inside companies with sensitive data without wasting time classifying what can and can't be backed up remotely.

It is like the Iron Mountain of backup solutions.

Duplicity GPG-encrypts all data too, though.

For the sake of argument (or, because you trust me on this), let's stipulate that Tarsnap is significantly more secure than duplicity; things can go wrong with duplicity (or create untenable administrative headaches) that don't with Tarsnap.

Nice try. If tarsnap does anything that duplicity or s3napback doesn't do, I wouldn't know it from the tarsnap website.

You are right that Tarsnap's website does a terrible job communicating the value. You're wrong about everything else. But I'm glad Colin is getting the data point here.

Tarsnap isn't just an S3 middleman. The Tarsnap client-server API is considerably more powerful (e.g., transactions, amortized S3 PUT costs) and you can't replicate the functionality on the client alone.

$7 a month for how much of your time? $7 for me is less than 10 minutes of time a month and I graduated school in May, it's not like I'm making an outrageous salary. $7 is the difference between going out to Subway for lunch or making a sandwhich in the morning, which is a decision I base every single day solely on how I feel when I wake up in the morning.

When you go to subway do you pay for the sandwich or do you subscribe to a $x/month recurring charge that gives you up to y sandwiches/month whether you eat them or not?

Since you seem to know a lot about pricing, could you give me a few pointers on what one would charge for something like http://historio.us/? Apparently you guys feel that $15 isn't a lot of money, but where I live it's not disposable income...

All I can tell you is:

* you have to find out what the value your service generates is to different groups of customers (an MBA would call them "segments").

* you have to figure out the cost of acquiring and maintaining customers in each segment.

* you price based on the value (if it creates $10/mo apparent value, that's the number with a gravitational pull).

* bust out cleverness to figure out ways to capture money from high-value low-volume segments without scaring away low-value high-volume segments.

I'm close enough to Colin's target market to know that "just stick the server's filesystem in tarsnap and don't even bother taking an inventory of what's on the machine" is worth multiples of S3+80% just in recovered admin productivity.

Ah, thank you.

I would pay $2.99 for the iPhone reader and $0 for the website because that's what Instapaper charges and this seems about the same.

Hmm, I think we need to change the copy. Everyone says it's the same as instapaper, even though there's no overlap... Thanks for your input!

Can you make it a browser add-on instead of bookmarklet? I don't know about the others, but I find the bookmarks toolbar clumsy and unnecessary and never turn it on. But I have at least a dozen add-ons installed.

Yes, we already have a chrome extension and a firefox extension is in the works. Unfortunately, only opera allows you to place bookmarklets anywhere in the UI. I don't like the toolbar very much either, but you can also add it to your bookmarks menu, it's just a bookmark.

I'm quite likely in the minority, but I strongly gravitate to services that 1) use a cost-based micro-pricing scheme; and 2) that I trust to not mark-up unreasonably much. Generally I want to offload the "how much should this kind of thing cost?" calculation to someone else who I can trust to calculate it accurately, add on a reasonable profit margin, and charge me that amount. I definitely avoid companies that I feel are instead trying to figure out how much they can get me to pay, and then pricing it at that.

One example, which I use for hosting, is nearlyfreespeech.net. Amazon's and Google's cloud services have a similar utility-pricing model, though I'm not sure how much I personally trust them to price in line with costs, especially whether they're going to pass on future cost decreases. Prgmr.com is a flat fee rather than a combination of micro-prices, but it has a little of the same vibe of, "I calculated how much it should cost to operate these servers, divided by the number of VPSs, added on a reasonable profit margin, and that's what I'm charging", which is one reason I went with them.

It's not even necessarily the overall price that worries me so much as liking the general warm-and-fuzzy feeling that I'm not getting a hugely marked up service. Same as when shopping for, say, a mechanic: I feel most comfortable with a mechanic I can trust to charge me what the repair costs, plus a reasonable profit, not one who's trying to size me up to figure out how much the repair is "worth to me".

Where do you live? I want to get a coffee some time, talk Putnams, and tell you why pricing in pico dollars attracts pathological customers who are the worst possible people to sell online backup to, and why instead you should be selling to people who happily pay a hundred times what you are currently charging.

Not specific to cperciva: If you have customers who value your service less than a cup of coffee, fire them. If this leaves you with no customers, consider a new app or marketing strategy.

Where do you live?

Vancouver, Canada. (Well, Burnaby technically, but close enough.)

I want to get a coffee some time [...]

Sure! Let me know if/when you're ever in Vancouver.

If you have customers who value your service less than a cup of coffee, fire them.

I disagree. The money I get from Tarsnap's $0.01/month users is insignificant, obviously -- but they're worth many $/month for their willingness to proselytize. The utility pricing model is like the freemium model, except it weeds out the people who aren't willing to pay anything at all.

> except it weeds out the people who aren't willing to pay anything at all.

And those with just too much data and too little budget :)

Yes, but I was comparing against freemium models, and people with lots of data and little money would need to use (and wouldn't be able to afford) the "premium" side of "freemium".

why do you want customers with lots of data and little money?

I don't. Nobody does. My point was that the utility pricing model is no different from the freemium model here, in that both eliminate those customers.

Well, for some values of 'little', in my case it worked out to about $10K / month iirc :)

If you have 20-odd terabytes of data to back up, I am guessing that you probably can afford a tape drive and take your own backups.

Yes, I can afford the tape drive. No, that's not a solution for me.

Check out what tarsnap does so you can compare tarsnap with a tapedrive.

I know what it does, and you are not going to be getting prices that you can afford from anything backing to S3.

This (S3's storing everything so redundantly) is what I see as the main benefit that tarsnap would get you, since the encryption itself is the easy part---just GPG your dump before writing to tape.

Now, I might be strawmanning you. What does tarsnap get you in particular that tapes do not?

Is this a problem?

"and tell you why pricing in pico dollars attracts pathological customers who are the worst possible people to sell online backup to"

When I saw the pico-dollars bit on the site I instantly knew this was not someone I wanted to do business with. The sort of person who tries to prove his intelligence constantly rarely has the ability to cut through the fat to get into the meat of the matter. They'll play in the weeds all day long, but never climb the mountain for a good view.

I agree with Patio11, buck up grow a pair and charge good money. It looks like you've got solid infrastructure, it just needs to be charged for and sold.

It's not even a smart pricing model; it's built on the assumption that the first "byte-month" costs as much and is as valuable to the end-user as the trillionth.

I never even thought about the pricing model. But you're right he isn't doing rent extraction properly. I merely saw how he presented himself with "picodollars" and thought to myself "I know this guy. He spent twenty minutes telling me about the great deal on peaches he got".[1]

Seriously, switch to $/Gig, and sell the hell out of it. I don't care how smart you are. Show me how you can make my life better/simpler then get the hell out of it.

1. True story. I've gained a good nose for these people and I just walk away after the first encounter.

There's also a mental barrier that comes up when you see something unusual. I don't think about my expenses in pico dollars and I don't think about my important data in bytes. The worst part for me is that at $0.30/GB for storage and bandwidth the cost seems so low that I really don't even care if I'm using a full GB or just 12 bytes. Charge me the $0.30 and be done with it. If I can't glance at the service and guestimate how much it would cost me I'm not going to stick around long enough to find out.

Of course, the other thing to note here is that restaurants don't put dollar signs next to prices because they don't want people sitting there thinking about how much it costs.

The word "picodollar" is basically a dollar sign with a <blink> tag around it.

I'm surprised you don't see the humour in a 'pico dollar'.

I thought - this guy has DJB sized balls, I really want to use it. portsnap was great, this will be too.

And I don't even have a beard.

Colin has a platinum backed BSD pedigree. Tarsnap appears to be aiming at BSD minded users in the first instance ie people who mostly know what they are doing. Colin's grown tarsnap out of what he knows, the BSD aesthetic. What you know is a really good place to start.

But now, to grow tarnap beyond the BSD commandline pico-niche, something I really hope Colin does, because he's earned the success, it could / should adopt a Jungledisk like model. With an OS X desktop client, clearer pricing, and Apple level UX/marketing. And clients for home storage devices like Qnaps etc. And yes he should charge much more for that. Tarsnap does seem bizarrely, wonderfully cheap. And long may it remain that way... on the commandline.

I will chime in my 2 cents, or coffee advice.

Tarsnap should white label the service and keep the existing pricing. It will increase their volume drastically and the really low pricing will allow a lot of people to build a very profitable business on top of the service.

Someone then can charge 20$/month and a buck a gig for storage with some flashy mac/iphone/ipad app and kill it.

There's nothing to stop you building services on top of Tarsnap. In fact, I've deliberately arranged things (e.g., the flexible and easily scripted tar interface, and CSV format downloads of usage data) to make it possible to do this.

If you want to build a service on top of Tarsnap, please let me know and I'll do my best to provide you with whatever interfaces you need.

Ca I upvote this about 50 times? I Googled the service, saw "picodollars", and bolted. And I'm a hardcore geek who knows Linux well, has compiled Apache from scratch on Solaris, ran a web hosting company for 6 years, etc. etc.

Not listening to your customers will make it rough road for your company. Your customers say don't price in picodollars. Your customers say price flat rate and figure out how much storage you can afford to give them for that rate while still making a healthy margin. You'd do well to listen to them instead of justifying why you should continue to scare potential customers away.

Sorry to be alarmist/morbid, but what happens to tarsnap if you suddenly disappear/die?

I was going to make my own reply, but as usual patio has succinctly made the point. So I'll give some examples of what $15 really means.

- I spent $18 a month on Netflix without a second thought.

- $15 is one less meal per month at Chipotle (for 2 people). I'd gladly give that up for a decent service

- Average cable bill in the US is probably $80+. Give that up and you not only waste less time, but can afford at least 6 of these services.

- Once you're out of college, you will GLADLY give up $15/month to save time. Time with family is precious and anytime I can spend a small amount of money to gain more time I consider it a win-win.

- Most middle class families probably spend more than $15/week at Starbucks alone.

- From a business standpoint, $2/user/month is simply not sustainable.

Parking in Chicago next to my office costs $25/day. (The train costs $5/day for me, but I'm unusually close to it).

I assume you're talking about Metra? The el costs me $4.50/day or ~$80/month for unlimited. Although that's extraordinarily cheap compared to parking!

The blue line and a two transfers. I'm a short walk from the green line, but I I'll pay to avoid riding it.

The green line is that bad? (I wouldn't know... I always take the blue in from Oak Park.)

(a) Long time no hear!

(b) Yes.

Continued: the green trains are older, they have no airflow, they're slower, they're consistently much more crowded, and they're rowdier.

The #91 bus down Austin is so much better than the green that it's a no brainer just to bus down to the blue line station. It helps that the train stops right outside our office, though.

average cable bill in the US in 2008 was $71. http://www.multichannel.com/article/196364-Study_Average_Cab...

increases since then seems to be 5-7% per year.

good guess!

I pay $25/year for Flickr Pro, which is almost exactly $2/user/month.

But are they profitable or are they expecting to make it up some other way?

Just because a discounted price for a year up front works out to be a low amount per month, doesn't mean it's worth little to the business charging it. Depending on the business, it might actually turn out to be $4 a month if that user were prone to cancelling after 6 months. Additionally, there is alot to say about money in the bank now to fund development now.

I would be happy if our 20k users all payed for a year up front discounted by 30%, rather than a full-price for every month. Why? Because we don't have much income now, and getting the money now would allow us to expand much faster, so the next 20k users would signup quicker, and would not have the big discount for an entire year up front.

Also, the overheads (credit card fees etc) are often lower on $25/year billed yearly then $2/month billed monthly (once you are at Yahoo's scale this might not apply, but for a lot of businesses there is a flat fee for processing credit cards below a certain threshold).

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