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Noob Question: When an average person buys 2TB storage from a cloud provider one pays upfront for the entire thing. Would pricing for a product be made more competitive(vs dropbox) using such a solution?

It takes somtimes years to fill it up with photos, vidoes and other documents. Sounds like one could build a great killer low amortized – pay as you fill it up – service for people to compete with dropbox.

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This is true, and I think that there are consumer (or at least "run on your laptop") versions of this that could make sense. However, the technology underneath would have to look very different. For example, these protocols are designed for online file systems (e.g. you must be connected to the file system directly in order to list what's in a directory). This works great in a data center, but doesn't work great on your laptop.

On the other hand, something like Dropbox is actually a program running on your laptop that simulates a file system, and then does the synchronization at the file level as needed. I think that there's probably some latent demand for a similar product for developers to access their S3 buckets easily from their laptops, and it's something we might look into as we get farther along.

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