[hospadam]

I'm really happy for the Snapjoy team - I love their product! But to be honest, I'm a little bummed. I thought that since this service was making money through subscriptions, they would be around for a while. I spent a lot if time and effort moving my entire photo library to their cloud.

I know they haven't given any details about the future of the product, but I imagine they will move the team to DropBox products. As someone who was hoping for a long term improving product, that's a little depressing.

I guess the lesson is that even startups that you pay for aren't immune to being sold. What services are safe to invest time and money in using?

[OmarIsmail]

Even big "safe" companies like Microsoft and Google discontinue services. It's probably better to accept the fact that services come and go as the price of progress and figure out how to live in such a world.

This is actually one of the ironic casualties of the cloud. In the old days you bought your packaged software and it was pretty much guaranteed to work as long as you didn't change your setup (OS, hardware, etc). With cloud services the change is out of your control, so there's nothing you can do to freeze your setup.

This is probably a reason why there may be a growing market for personal clouds.

[edanm]

"This is actually one of the ironic casualties of the cloud. In the old days you bought your packaged software and it was pretty much guaranteed to work as long as you didn't change your setup (OS, hardware, etc)."

And this led to a lot of other problems, for example, you couldn't keep up with new technological innovations because you needed older systems for some programs.

It's an interesting question, which practice is better.

[Moto7451]

I think the best approach is to make sure whatever service you decide to use has good import/export features.

A boss at a job I worked at a few years ago still keeps his contacts in an ancient version of Lotus organizer without VCard export support. As a result he's pretty much locked into it unless he ponies up $100 for the latest version of the software (released in 2003) which has VCard export. He's too cheap to do that so he'll have to stick with it as long as he is still on a version of Windows that supports 16bit software.

[bentcorner]

I've looked a little at ownCloud - I'd be interested in hearing about what other people have tried and found to be functional.

[jmathai]

Have a look at OpenPhoto. We've got a pull request for ownCloud support.

http://theopenphotoproject.org or https://openphoto.me or https://github.com/photo

Disclaimer, I'm the lead dev

[btgeekboy]

I gave it a try in a VM for a few hours, hoping to find a replacement to Dropbox and Box.net.

Without diving into the source, my primary complaint was that the whole thing felt unpolished. There were display errors that just needed some TLC, documentation that sorely needed the eyes of a proficient English proofreader, and issues that made me wonder if there were going to be underlying security concerns. (For example, sometimes the path in the URL would be encoded, sometimes not... just makes you wonder what's lurking under there.)

[kmfrk]

Draft a user contract that companies can sign if they will. A Grover pledge for letting users get their money's worth, if you will.

[Sparrow](http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/) is a great example. They were acquired soon after the release of their iPhone app. That kinda soured me and many others.

EDIT: The same could be done for other cases, obviously. Take usage rights on social photo services as a completely hypothetical example. :)

EDIT2: In fact, it could be something YC requires their funded companies to do. That must be pretty popular considering all the Instagram/Flickr debacle.

When was it that Y Combinator decided to ban companies supporting SOPA/PIPA or something to that effect?

[karamazov]

If you require every company you work with to sign a contract with you, you'll find that no one will sell you anything.

Imagine running a cloud service, where you make $10/month/user, and having to read through a separate contract for each person. Does that make sense?

The reality is, you have limited control over a product that you've paid $5, $50, or even $500 for. At most you can get a refund if you're unhappy with the service you received. You cannot force the team of developers to continue work on something, unless you're paying the millions of dollars that that costs.

[kmfrk]

It doesn't have to be legally binding. The damage it can do to a reputation is deterrent enough.

And it's not difficult to see how adopting it can have benefits: http://blog.flickr.net/en/2011/05/13/at-flickr-your-photos-a....

A lot of people are abandoning Instagram not because of the ToS per se, but because they were reminded that it is now owned by Facebook. And Facebook's reputation is horrible.

Look at what Tumblr are doing by posting their policies on GitHub, which lets everyone see the diffs: https://github.com/tumblr/policy.

Goodwill doesn't have to be legally tethered. But it can be.

[hexis]

"What services are safe to invest time and money in using?"

Your own.

[fab13n]

> I'm a little bummed. I thought [...] they would be around for a while.

Supposing that they don't butcher the migration, what Snapjoy service do you love, which wouldn't benefit from a close integration with Dropbox?

My only beef with Dropbox is that the gap between free users and paid customers is too wide, price wise. I understand that customers have to subsidize the hordes of freeloaders, but $120 a year for 100GB doesn't feel right. Maybe they shouldn't try to be profitable yet.

Other than that, they've successfully sneaked a usable file system in iOS, they support all my devices including Linux, they "just work" unless you try to share writing rights, and they're going to get us rid of the dreadful iTunes, iPhoto and no doubt one day iBook/Kindle. That's super impressive.

[justincormack]

Do you think they should start to limit the free tier? I have never paid but do find it useful. On the other hand Google docs which I do pay for covers some of my use cases and I would self host if there was a standard api.

[fab13n]

I think they should:

* either lower the entry price and limit the features of the free version if they need to be profitable now, getting more paying customers with a lower ARPU;

* or lower the entry price a lot, lose money and increase both free and paying market-share, if market-share is their current priority.

But the current gap from free to paying is too damn high IMO.

[redguava]

What services are safe? Companies that haven't taken funding and are profitable. If they have taken funding then they are forced to look for an exit (acquisition, IPO, etc.). It's a ticking time bomb.

[timjahn]

"What services are safe to invest time and money in using?"

Great question. I think in this situation, a company like Dropbox is probably safer, as they're a lot bigger in certain measurements (amount of funding, amount of revenue, etc).

I think the companies that have the most to lose are the safest to invest time and money in using. A small startup that just started 3 weeks ago is more likely to be sold than a company like Dropbox, in my opinion.

[amirmc]

> "A small startup that just started 3 weeks ago is more likely to be sold than a company like Dropbox, in my opinion"

I agree with the rest of your post but what you said above doesn't make sense to me. A 3 week startup is probably more likely to die than be bought whereas Dropbox would likely be a fantastic purchase (for anyone who could afford them). The aim of such Startups (at least if they have VC investors) is to sell the company at some point, whether that be to the public (IPO) or another company (acquisition).

[timjahn]

"A 3 week startup is probably more likely to die than be bought.."

Exactly. My point is that a 3 week old startup is more likely to disappear quickly (fail, get bought, etc.) than a company like Dropbox. Dropbox is a good acquisition target, but I think a company like that would take longer to do so.

As you said, a company like Dropbox could also go for an IPO, in which case, theoretically, they still provide the product that you're paying them for.

[kylec]

The problem though is that if everyone waits around for services to become established, then no service will be able to grow to the necessary size to become established.

[jfoster]

Users have to trade off risk of the service vanishing with the utility of the service. I think most users are already doing that when evaluating the products/services of startups. (or any business, really)

[timjahn]

Hm. True.

I think there will always be early adopters to help startups get their initial traction.

[jfoster]

The ones where the service you depend on is a healthy core business for them, and they're perhaps too large for an acquisition.

Even in that case, you will still find that no company keeps their products or services static over decades. In most cases you probably wouldn't want them to. Imagine how it would feel to be stuck on Windows 95.