Go to the "Simple Pricing" page. Click the 0-999 GB for 2 cents/GB link. That's great pricing.
Select 15 GB.
Get message telling me the minimum is 500 GB.
That's not the kind of company I'm going to trust with my data. What other kind of BS are they going to try to pull if they're willing to do something like this before I'm even a customer?
Maybe they don't want small customers like me. That's okay. Just be honest about it on your website.
I am sorry if that is confusing - it is not in any way meant to be a dark pattern or misleading.
We can't charge people, for instance, 30 cents per month (as in your example) - the fees or processing your card (or paypal payment) would be larger than that.
The minimum order of 500 GB computes to $10 per month. If you have a very tight budget, please email info@rsync.net and I will personally figure out a way (annual payment, whatever) to make it work for you. It will be larger than 15 GB, however, unless you want to pay 5 years in advance.
I was just about to change the wording on the pricing page to be "500-9999 GB" but that's even more confusing, IMO ... I think most people understand that processing fees dictate a minimum order ...
You can - you just need to eliminate the card processing from most transactions in these cases. Allow users to top up a balance with a minimum buy-in that meets your processing threshold, and decrement that balance as services are consumed.
This does require some degree of effort in terms of implementation and accounting, but it drastically increases the appeal of your service to small businesses and personal users.
I feel like you're really downplaying what would be involved. It is a great suggestion, but the effort to manage and implement doesn't sound trivial. Personally, the few systems that exclusively use this model drive me nuts. Instead of just paying for what I want I have to add to this account, then pay for what I want.
For the business owner, they now have to account for and secure new account balances. At a large scale (Starbucks has $1.6 billion [1]), you can likely cover any additional regulatory and accounting costs and also make money. On a small scale it can be a liability that costs more than it brings in.
[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/jp_koning/status/1160387043790413...
It looks like a good service for those with moderate and large data storage needs, but it would be better to be clear about that from the start. I know a lot of people that will test these services with smaller amounts of data before making a commitment.
I think you guys could benefit form "early adoption" people like me. My company might not be a very big client now, as with any startup, we plan to grow and thus our offsite storage requirements. But for me, I prefer to spend the dev-time to integrate with a provider early once, preferably in something that will last for a long time (so I don't have to spend dev time again soon)
$15/yr for 50?
> rsync.net began providing cloud storage for offsite backups in the fall of 2001, for our original corporate parent, JohnCompanies.
> In 2006, we became a stand-alone firm dedicated only to offsite backup. We provide this simple product and nothing else.
I set up rsync.net with a previous employer a decade ago and I am quite certain that all of the automation set up at that time is probably still functioning flawlessly.
Never had a single issue, it Just Worked from day one and provided us with off-site backups using trivial technology that took me scant minutes to set up.
It may not have the glitz of Amazon S3 and such, but the raw simplicity of the product + the stellar track record of the provider is very compelling.
If the problem is not wanting to support a bunch of small accounts, I totally get that, but if the problem is credit card fees every month, there are lots of ways to avoid that.
They could probably be more clear about minimums, but the minimum isn't unreasonable.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, however, if this is a showstopper for you, just email info@rsync.net and we'll figure out a way to give you a 100 GB (or whatever) account that you pay annually or something.
Otherwise I don’t see a problem with a minimum of 500GB to keep things efficient.
On the other hand I believe there is a micro market waiting, paying 1-3 usd/month for 15GB.
$6 /mo minimum storage charge, and they have a 90 day minimum. That, combined with the free trial ending as soon as I put my credit card in meant they tried charging me $18 for the GB of test data I uploaded... I should have read the fine print more closely, apparently.