Comment by wheels | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wheels | Hacker News Reader

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This is something that's repeated here, but I have a feeling mostly by folks that are backing up small amounts of mostly static data.

Even after de-duplication and compression, my company stores about 400 GB of data with Tarsnap. Tarsnap is a double digit percentage of our monthly infrastructure costs.

I think, perhaps, it's rather that the value that a business backing up a 30 MB database every day gets isn't radically different from the value that we get backing up several orders of magnitude more than that.

The question really is if straight utility pricing makes sense. I could imagine that a floor on the pricing, or a non-linear curve would probably do better than simply keeping the same model and raising the prices. There's also a question of distribution of total revenue -- if the revenue for the small accounts was increased by 10x, would it balance out a 50% loss of large accounts?

There's also a question of distribution of total revenue -- if the revenue for the small accounts was increased by 10x, would it balance out a 50% loss of large accounts?

No. You wouldn't be far off if you assumed that 100% of Tarsnap's revenue came from large accounts.

> The question really is if straight utility pricing makes sense. I could imagine that a floor on the pricing, or a non-linear curve would probably do better than simply keeping the same model and raising the prices.

The question is if the costs of running tarsnap correlate exactly with the amount of data that is stored, or if the number of users also have to be factored into the equation, ie. if each additional user has an added cost. I would say that in a business like this, with a low barrier to entry, the price should reflect the costs as close as possible. So if there's a constant setup cost for each user, the price shouldn't be $X/GB, but $X/GB + $Y.

Ideally, Tarsnap should make the same amount of money from a single user storing 100 TB and 100×10^12 users store a single byte. If this is not the case, the pricing structure is suboptimal.

Suboptimal in what way? I doubt that would be optimal for profit.

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