It looks like your product targeted consumers, but professionals seem like they'd be a better market. And it should have been priced way, way higher; the more it cost, the more secure it looks. I'd have a hard time trusting my money-making business assets to a $9/month service.
Of course, I'm not a professional photographer nor do I have your experience in trying to build this business, so who knows what my opinion is worth. :-)
Consider the some examples:
* An older photographer who grew up in the days of film who has just transitioned over to digital.
* A homemaker who is trying to add some much needed income for her family, with a passion but no formal training.
* A well-off software developer who moonlights as a photographer for fun and a little extra money.
Of those, only the third has been exposed, formally, to correct data backup procedures. The others are likely to keep their photos in folders on the desktop of their laptop.
Furthermore, photography is not a very lucrative profession for most photographers. That limits the amount you can charge. Our original pricing was much higher, but we realized that would be problematic, considering the average photographer brings in around $30k per year.
"Professional photographers know they need to backup their photos."
A homemaker or techie moonlighting for extra income aren't really 'professional photographers'. They may take photographs that look professional, but it's not the same thing.
One might say that professional developers use version control, then have counter examples of "well, this web design student doesn't ever uer version control, but she's the only person working on the code, so it doesn't matter". This is not a professional developer, even if she is capable of producing results that look like they were done by a professional.
A professional, imo, is defined as much by their habits and practices as by the output.
A friend of mine had her wedding photographer lose 6 months of data in a hard drive crash. She should have known better, and may have, but she didn't do proper backups.
What else would you call it, if not professional?
That said, I have to harass her about backups.
Everyone I know backed up on-site, using manual methods as and when they remembered. I did actually set up a good automated backup solution for one of them, but there's definitely a limit to their interest. Remember they're making pretty much all their money off commissions, and are only keeping backups out of some sense of pride/responsibility.
Another blow is that, at least here in the UK, we're only starting to get the kind of upstream bandwidth necessary to make this level of data transfer feasible.
So, it's a brilliant idea and, as long as confidence in cloud storage grows, as time goes on the market will grow and grow. I'm just not sure it's quite there yet.
As a web developer who works on a lot of solo projects, this sentence hurts me.
> It did this by compressing the photos to full resolution, high quality JPEGs, which saved anywhere from 50%-90% of the size. The downside of this, of course, is that photographers who shoot in RAW would only have a JPEG copy backed up. We figured this was a reasonable compromise. In a catastrophic event, wouldn't a photographer rather have a JPEG copy than nothing at all? It turns out the answer was no. But we didn't ask that question, because we thought the answer was so obvious.
I am no photographer... but from what I can see in this thread, what people are looking for is a solution to store RAW image files. I am sure photographers can find already good solutions to store good-quality JPG copies of their files.