Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by patio11 3039 days ago
You're paying $0.01 to give your GB to Amazon and $0.24 to make it impossible for Amazon to give it to anyone else. If you don't care about Amazon giving your data to anyone else, then you don't have to pay the premium for Tarsnap.

There are plenty of data sets for which that is reasonable. There are plenty of data sets, perhaps not at your shop, where $0.24 laughs in the general direction of the value of a gigabyte. I previously used Tarsnap at a HIPAA-regulated SaaS app. The fines for unplanned disclosure are measured per-record not per gigabyte; my rough guesstimate on proration is $12 million / GB but what's an order of magnitude or three between friends.
2 comments
shostack 3039 days ago
"What are you really paying for?" is a great question to ask for any product or service. An even greater one to answer if you are the one marketing said product or service.
link
ad_hominem 3038 days ago
But it doesn't cost $0.24 to make it impossible for Amazon to give it to anyone else. I'm using BorgBackup to encrypt my data, and it appears to use the same AES-256 and HMAC-SHA256 algorithms as tarsnap. There are a plethora of open source backup software that will encrypt your data and not charge you monthly for it.
link
kasey_junk 3038 days ago
So the easiest way to describe that 0.24 is 'you get the support of one of the best people in the world at file security'.

I'll get that might not be attractive to you. You are likely not a good customer for him.

To me, it takes a lot of data and not much amount of my time to make that value proposition waaaaay worth it.

link
ad_hominem 3037 days ago
That's a good way of putting it.

I wish I were at a place in my life where the difference between $3/mo and $75/mo ($36/year vs $900/year) is a non-issue, but unfortunately I'm not. So for now my family photos and videos will have to be securely stored with the (probably) slightly sub-par designs of the open source software I'm using.

link
T2_t2 3037 days ago
So after all that, we're back to "you are not the right customer". The key to business is to charge an amount that gets the customers you want. Ironically, cheaper customers are almost always more work, fullstop let alone per dollar.
link