[vitus]

One thing that stands out to me is an unintended consequence of the pricing structure:

Storing a 250GB backup and sending to 10 machines: $1 for storage, $22.5 for egress.

Storing a 250 GB backup, 2250GB of /dev/zero, and sending your backup to 10 machines: $10 for storage, $0 for egress.

[xyzzy123]

That's an interesting observation! Definitely creates weird incentives.

It seems incentives also depend on the nitty gritty details around how you are billed which are not defined very clearly. Granularity and timing, whether you pay for part months of storage etc.

However all games aside it does seem like if your own egress were free (or much cheaper than 0.01) it would be most efficient to send your data directly to where it needed to go, yourself.

Then you'd only be paying $1 for the backup.

[_v7gu]

Looks like someone forgot to put incentive compatibility constraints to their pricing optimization problem

[onionjake]

Interesting thought thread on our pricing structure... It saves money if you intend to send the backup to 10x places every month. If you only intend to do it once though you don't come out ahead $10 * 3=$30 versus $1 * 3+$22.50 = $25.50.

[vitus]

Good point -- the minimum 3-month storage duration eliminates this edge case for one-offs (since 3 * $0.4 > $1).

That said, it almost breaks even after the first month and pays off for itself a week into the second month. To eliminate this incentive, I'd suggest setting the cost of egress at (or below) the cost of storage.

It also would make more sense to me as a prospective customer that I'm not paying crazy overage fees, and I'm paying as if I reuploaded the same data and downloaded it an extra time.