[solatic]

Help me understand - you build on top of AWS, which charges $0.09/GB for egress to the Internet, yet you're charging $0.05/GB for egress to the Internet? Sounds like you're subsidizing egress from AWS? Or do you have access to non-public egress pricing?

[shikhar]

(Founder) We are not charging in preview. At the scale where it matters, we will work it out. Definitely some assumptions in here.

[bigstrat2003]

For what it's worth, there's zero chance I would do business with a company whose business plan is "we'll work it out". It gives one every reason to believe that in a couple years time you guys will either be out of business (because you didn't figure out the numbers to make a profit) or will pull the rug from under customers in the form of surprise price hikes. Obviously you have to do what you think is right, but I think that this approach is going to scare off a lot of customers for you.

[shikhar]

(Founder) We are not charging during preview. If anything, I wanted to be transparent about our planned pricing. Our mission is to make streams a cloud storage primitive, and I worked backwards from there in terms of our costs and expected costs looking ahead once we can scale a bit - based on concrete data points about what kind of discounts can be unlocked. I realized it was premature based on the comments here, so the price for internet egress has been updated. Thank you for your feedback.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

Just FYI, that doesn't give me confidence in the longevity of your service.

[srik]

Cloud services offer giant discounts sometimes and the receiving party aren't allowed to talk about it concretely so that's probably what's happening here.

[shikhar]

(Founder) I understand the concern. However, cloud discounts at scale can be very large, and we are going to share as much of it as we reasonably can.

[everfrustrated]

Discounts require multi year commitment for minimum (and increasing) spend. Generally you need to be either profitable or a well funded startup to demonstrate why a vendor would trust your ability to pay (it's literally a debt on your books). How do they know you're good for it?

Plus multi cloud means less scale and less marketing incentive (can't talk about you as a x cloud customer).

I wish you the best, but would encourage you to not set your prices below your costs.

[shikhar]

(Founder) Thank you for the advice. I hope we can offer better when the deals come into play, but for now setting our planned internet egress price to $0.08/GiB.

[JoshTriplett]

Do you plan to charge differently for bandwidth depending on whether the customer is in AWS or not? Would be nice if you pass on the cost savings.

[shikhar]

(Founder) Yes, we will charge less for private connectivity. Pricing is transparent https://s2.dev/pricing - free during preview.

[CodesInChaos]

Doesn't AWS charge $0.01 intra region and $0.02 between regions, even without setting up private links? Can't you pass part of those savings (compared to the $0.05-$0.09 of egress) on? Or is it too difficult to detect if the remote IP qualifies?

[shikhar]

(Founder) Unfortunately, if you access over a public IP, it is internet egress. Even if the client is in the same AWS cloud region. PrivateLink is the only option.

[chicagobuss]

Peering is an option as well but it's a whole different ballgame of complexities to set up vs. private link

[nfm]

List pricing is $0.05 per GB after 150TB and at high volume it’s cheaper than that

[kondro]

They’re probably betting on most users being in AWS and only having to pay 1¢-2¢ transfer.

[ckdarby]

They're also banking on scale to PPA with a specific amendment for egress.

[amazingman]

Nobody with sufficient scale will be paying retail for data transfer.

[CodesInChaos]

Looks like they changed it to $0.08/GB. Which loses them at most $300/month at 50TB, and makes money after that.

[MicolashKyoka]

strat is likely just get users, then offboard aws if the product works.

[shikhar]

(Founder) No, we want to be in the same cloud regions as customers.