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Comment by shikhar | Hacker News Reader

(Founder) We are not charging in preview. At the scale where it matters, we will work it out. Definitely some assumptions in here.

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For what it's worth, there's zero chance I would do business with a company whose business plan is "we'll work it out". It gives one every reason to believe that in a couple years time you guys will either be out of business (because you didn't figure out the numbers to make a profit) or will pull the rug from under customers in the form of surprise price hikes. Obviously you have to do what you think is right, but I think that this approach is going to scare off a lot of customers for you.

(Founder) We are not charging during preview. If anything, I wanted to be transparent about our planned pricing. Our mission is to make streams a cloud storage primitive, and I worked backwards from there in terms of our costs and expected costs looking ahead once we can scale a bit - based on concrete data points about what kind of discounts can be unlocked. I realized it was premature based on the comments here, so the price for internet egress has been updated. Thank you for your feedback.

Just FYI, that doesn't give me confidence in the longevity of your service.

(Founder) I understand the concern. However, cloud discounts at scale can be very large, and we are going to share as much of it as we reasonably can.

Discounts require multi year commitment for minimum (and increasing) spend. Generally you need to be either profitable or a well funded startup to demonstrate why a vendor would trust your ability to pay (it's literally a debt on your books). How do they know you're good for it?

Plus multi cloud means less scale and less marketing incentive (can't talk about you as a x cloud customer).

I wish you the best, but would encourage you to not set your prices below your costs.

(Founder) Thank you for the advice. I hope we can offer better when the deals come into play, but for now setting our planned internet egress price to $0.08/GiB.

Cloud services offer giant discounts sometimes and the receiving party aren't allowed to talk about it concretely so that's probably what's happening here.

Do you plan to charge differently for bandwidth depending on whether the customer is in AWS or not? Would be nice if you pass on the cost savings.

(Founder) Yes, we will charge less for private connectivity. Pricing is transparent https://s2.dev/pricing - free during preview.

Doesn't AWS charge $0.01 intra region and $0.02 between regions, even without setting up private links? Can't you pass part of those savings (compared to the $0.05-$0.09 of egress) on? Or is it too difficult to detect if the remote IP qualifies?

(Founder) Unfortunately, if you access over a public IP, it is internet egress. Even if the client is in the same AWS cloud region. PrivateLink is the only option.

Peering is an option as well but it's a whole different ballgame of complexities to set up vs. private link

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