Aha, that makes much more sense. So the problem wasn't that they didn't have founders' shares, or that they didn't have enough shares; but rather that they were selling off shares at ridiculously low prices.
Tarsnap Backup Inc. officially has 100 Common shares outstanding, but there's no way I'll issue new shares for $0.50 each. ;-)
By the way, I signed up for Tarsnap and am using it "in anger" for Appointment Reminder. My predicted bill for this month is something on the order of 60 cents. It is, literally, the smallest business oriented bill I have ever forced my accountant to look at, and would fall below the noise floor but for the fact that I want paper records of me having paid for a professional backup service in case I ever have to prove this for my insurance agency. (I have professional liability insurance and data loss/data breach insurance for Appointment Reminder, chiefly because I have hospitals as clients and they want to know that if I screw up there will be deep pockets in the neighborhood to sue to settle up with. The insurance company is basically renting their deep pockets out on a "We are willing to bet that you won't screw up" basis, but to protect their interests, they have a 15 point checklist for various things Serious Businesses do regarding data security and if it turns out that I'm not a Serious Business than my Serious Business Insurance Policy will not actually cover me.)
I would, and this is my honest and true opinion as a customer rather than as someone who has nagged you for years to raise your prices, prefer to pay $100 per month for no reason other than to avoid having my insurance company think that I am a stupid kid playing at being a real business by entrusting core parts of my infrastructure to a service which costs me sub-coffee money. In the event of me having an insured loss (which, n.b., I hope to never have and to just set fire to the $10 a day I pay for insurance), I really don't want to have that conversation. Please make me not have to have that conversation. I can pay.
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How many Tarsnap-like services are there, which with the right salespeople and a 5,000+% markup could be sold into "The Enterprise" - which would be a completely non-competitive demographic to the developer/startup trying to sell at <$30/month (or even <$1/month)?
Patrick, iterested in going 50:50 partners in BEMTBS? (Bigiain's Enterprise Managed Tarsnap Backup Service) You do sales, I'd handle "fullfillment" (read: invoicing), out of goodwill we can cut Colin in for 15% of all sales (and not even charge him commission on the Tarsnap bills incurred by our customers).
(Oh, and Patrick, BTW - my offer above of our $99.40/month plan is the "Personal Plan". Our "Business Plan", which includes all the features of the Personal Plan plus the words "Business Plan" on each invoice and statement is $248.40/month, and our "Enterprise Plan", which includes everything with the Business Plan plus the words "Enterprise Plan" on the invoices and statements _plus_ up to 3 faxed copies of each invoice as well as the PDF and USPS physical/paper mailed copies, is only $499/month.)
Seriously, I'd love to see people reselling Tarsnap. This is the main reason I provide accounting details in CSV format. As long as you pay me for your / your customers' usage, I don't care how much you charge your customers.
Great! And if you're like most Tarsnap users on that scale, you go around telling everybody about how awesome and inexpensive Tarsnap is.
Seriously, I have lots of customers who pay me less than $1 in cash each month, but orders of magnitude more in free advertising.
I would [...] prefer to pay $100 per month ...
I think you're the first Tarsnap customer to say this. Send me an email and I'll see what I can do for you. ;-)
The problem is that Tarsnap is one person. If Colin dies suddenly (in the sysadmin world, the primary cause of theoretical death is buses), you have a problem. Say your account is down to €10 and you have 100G of data stored in there when when the #10 express mows down Colin. You might not be able to get it back since you can't top up your account now unless your method of payment is fully automated on his side.
Looking over his website, I don't see if there is a Colin-backup plan anywhere. There should be. Until then Tarsnap should be one of your backup systems - not the only one.