Tarsnap now available to residents of Canada | Hacker News Reader

Tarsnap now available to residents of Canada

tarsnap.com

70 pointsralph27 comments

So much for my plans of "send an email to tarsnap-announce, write a blog post, then submit that blog post to Hacker News"...

I'm surprised no one posted your other emails when you were sending them (the ones about the outage). Kind of expected here.

I don't mind having information "leak out" -- as far as I'm concerned, it's public as soon as I hit send. I was just surprised at how fast it arrived here.

Didn't know if you were reticent to blow your own trumpet so thought I'd give a helping hand. Didn't realise a blog post would be in the offing; sorry.

Perhaps next time publish the blog post, submit here, then the announce list email, then the individual customer emails, that way you wouldn't be tipping off lots of possible submitters before you're ready. :-)

Announcement: http://www.mail-archive.com/tarsnap-announce@tarsnap.com/msg...

7(b) is new and 13 has been changed from "You may not use the service if you are a citizen or resident of Canada".

Just a general question: why offer a GPG key for download on the same site as the file to be verified? (If you expect users to download the key once and then verify multiple releases with it, why rotate the key every year?)

If I did it right, the code signing GPG key is signed by my personal GPG key, which is signed by the FreeBSD Security Officer GPG key, which is signed by lots and lots of people. So there's a chain of trust.

What was the problem preventing residents of Canada from using tarsnap?

Sales tax paperwork -- Tarsnap is based on Canada, so it has to charge sales taxes to Canadians.

Oddly enough, the Canada Revenue Agency is a bit unclear on how exactly to handle picodollars.

Should I wait for your blog post before I ask questions about how you handled everything?

I'll be providing details in my blog post, but the short answer is: I'm paying the taxes (aka. they're included in the advertised price), which allows me to compute them retroactively; and the government has absolutely no objection to people paying more taxes than they owe, which means that I can get away with calculating taxes in a way which technically wrong but actually both simpler and more in keeping with the spirit of the law.

Oddly enough, the Canada Revenue Agency is a bit unclear on how exactly to handle picodollars.

So are many of your prospective customers! STOP DOING THAT.

Using picodollars attracts exactly the customers I want.

You have absolutely no idea how many people have told me that they started using Tarsnap because of the picodollars.

I think I vouch for Thomas when I say that you have no idea how many more customers you can get and more importantly how much more money you will be able to make if you drop your picodollars pricing.

I work for various hedge funds in NYC and none of my clients will ever take Tarsnap seriously based on your pricing. They equate pricing with quality.

Not sure what the problem is. Would they use AWS? On EC2 pricing page you see prices like "$0.080 per Hour". On Tarsnap home page you see "$0.30/GB". What's the "quality price" for backup service?

that's their fault.

Clearly those people are the exact kinds of customers Colin is trying to avoid...

I think you're conflating two different issues here -- advertising prices in picodollars, and what the price per GB ends up being.

As far as picodollars go, I figured that hedge funds would understand those perfectly -- after all, they're in the business of shaving microseconds off their order times so that they can extract a few extra microdollars per share, right?

Colin,

I have a tremendous respect for you and I love your product. But you have to understand that hedge funds do not care about 'saving money' as much as they care about 'making money'. So yes, they will go to crazy lengths to shave microseconds off their order times but they will not try to save a penny while they are conducting their business.

From their perspective, when they see a product priced in picodollars their immediate reaction is that this is not a product for them. They want to use best in class product and they have learned over the years that the best in class product costs money, lots of it. So even though Tarsnap is best in class, they will ignore it because it is priced too low. For their back up service, they want to pay thousands of dollars and get a guarantee from the vendor that they will be their if shit hits the fan.

The lesson here is to fork a copy of the tarnsap codebase. Then hire a good designer/marketer to make a corporate-safe image for tarsnap-enterprise. Pictures of people in business attire smiling at spreadsheets and stuff. Price it 100x current- It's _military grade encryption!_

Then retire to somewhere arm and have umbrella drinks.

Are these hedge funds not sophisticated enough to understand exponential notation or SI prefixes? (Surely not!) Or is it that they feel the pricing scheme is too 'whimsical' for their ultra-serious line of work?

Maybe as an experiment Colin could spin a new website for the exact same tarsnap service, but renamed and repriced (10x?, 100x?) to suit the suits. I think that would be very interesting.

I just heard about tarsnap via this post and I love the idea of picodollars; count me in.

Colin,

what's the catch with picodollars?

Based on my experience with corporate people, where I spent too many years, the 'picodollar' thing would be a turn off.

Do you intent your target customers to be hackers/tech people and not corporate?

Just curious re your marketing strategy.

My target customers are hackers/tech people and the companies they work for.

I've had great success with hackers taking Tarsnap to their employers and saying "hey, we should use this". Picodollars don't cause any problems there; they say "it costs $0.30 / GB" and in the unlikely case that management actually looks at the Tarsnap website, it's just a technical thing and they trust their technical people.

The market I am excluding is corporate management seeing Tarsnap and deciding that they want to use it without understanding anything technical about it. I don't mind losing that market -- in fact, I'm happy to lose it, because I don't have the time necessary to provide hand-holding support to non-technical users.

Why charge US dollars for Canadians using a Canadian service? Big turn off for me as;

a. I incur extra fees converting money b. My sense of privacy is impaired.

Good question. Unfortunately, the Canadian dollar hasn't taken its rightful place as a pre-eminent world currency yet, so advertising prices in Canadian dollars would make it difficult for all the Tarsnap users outside of Canada to figure out what it costs.

I could theoretically take payments in both US and Canadian dollars, but practically speaking that would be a huge headache for my accounting systems.

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