BigStash offers 5 TB storage free for one year | Hacker News Reader

BigStash offers 5 TB storage free for one year

bigstash.co

11 pointsonurozen13 comments

FYI, after one year the price jumps to $500 dollars a year, for 5TB[0].

Comparatively, you can get a single user, 1TB storage Google Apps account, for $10[1] a month, and mount it with Expandrive for a one time license cost of $50[2]. This comes in at a yearly cost of $120, with a first year cost of $170.

Obviously, there is a 4TB discrepancy, but as an owner of this setup, I actually have 10TB of space available to me, which I suspect is just Google being nice.

Outside of reputable services, I'm fairly paranoid of the "put all your data with us for free for a year" and possibly run into serious price gouges in the future, leveraging slow internet speeds and long download times against unwitting users. I'm not by any means saying all companies are like this, but I'm very afraid of the power companies can have over my files[3].

[0] https://www.bigstash.co/pricing/. [1] https://support.google.com/a/answer/6034782?hl=en [2] http://www.expandrive.com/ [3] http://www.pcworld.com/article/2838327/bitcasa-nixes-unlimit...

There's also hubic (https://hubic.com/en/offers/), with an even more interesting pricing plan, and also compatible with expandrive.

This looks mighty fishy.

They claim to be based on Glacier, yet their plans (1TB and up) are cheaper than Glacier itself. They offer 5TB for $500/yr, on Glacier it costs $600/yr.

Even more worrying, they don't mention any retrieval fees nor limits.

Glacier will charge them almost $800 if they let you download your 5TB in a reasonable timeframe (7 days).

So, they are going to lose up to ~$1000 USD on every customer that takes their free offer, stores a significant portion of the free 5TB for a year and then downloads it all to move elsewhere...

Either that or they must have a truly amazing discount with Amazon.

Edit: Even assuming such a discount exists, that still looks like a very expensive marketing campaign considering most users will likely churn out after their free year...

Surely they are gambling that their customers don't download all of their data every year. Like Dropbox do with their free plan (I don't know about the other plans).

Hi, I'm the founder of BigStash.

We have been working with AWS Glacier for two years now, and we are very well aware of its complicated pricing scheme.

Part of our offering is the abstraction layer over Glacier's pricing. Yes, you may download all your files today. But this will probably be just 0.001% of the total Glacier storage we manage, and as such, it will not cost BigStash as much.

Something you didn't mention, is that there are also bandwidth costs involved. But the way our service is designed is more suitable for the kind of data you will rarely download. (And BTW, this will probably be a long-term relationship, if we live up to our promise and offer a good and reasonably priced service.)

Plus, most users will not use 100% of the storage they purchase. We expect this to be more often in larger plans, that's why we are offering a lower price per GB.

Thanks for your honest reply. It still seems like a pretty risky gamble to me (esp. since you mention no download limits), but wish you good luck with your service.

From what I can gather, BigStash is a rebrand of Deepfreeze.io, which itself is a sideproject of Longaccess.com, launched in 2013.

Not sure why, but the old saying 'if it's too good to be true, it probably is' keeps going around my head.

5tb would cost you what, £170 to purchase? (Brief Google search, feel free to correct me). Multiply that by the amount of customers that will sign up for this and it seems a little bit of a loss maker to me.

Note this is all just conjecture on my part, and I could be completely wrong.

They probably assume that most people either won't really use it or will then be locked in and pay after the year. Seems a bit risky, but if they've done it before they should have a basic idea what is feasible for them?

Hi, I'm the founder of BigStash.

The idea is simple: this is an archiving service in the cloud. If you want to test an archiving service in the cloud, you will probably want to upload multiple GB. We wanted our users to feel free to use the service in order to decide if it fits their needs.

Yes, if you store 5TB it will cost you $500 next year. But that's relatively cheap compared to most other cloud storage services.

I suggest that anyone who's tried to use Amazon Glacier think about this... this service looks amazing. What happens though when you want to leave (or stop paying) would the users own S3 and Glacier accounts be able to have the files moved there?

Interesting concept: non-immediate access to large amounts of storage.

It's the foundation of Amazon Glacier (which this seems to be based on)

I don't understand the concept though. non-immediate access is great, but at a reduced price - right?

Having a deep storage type service priced the same as Dropbox / GDrive (for 1TB atleast), seems odd to me.

I'd love this service if it was significantly cheaper than Dropbox, but i'm currently using Dropbox for the same thing and it's a $1 cheaper. Sure, i could pay 5x the price for 5x the storage on BigStash, but that's just not in my needs currently.

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