Yeah, I must be missing the point as well.

"Upthere says it plans to offer an API in hopes that developers will make it the default storage solution for their own apps"

So... how is that in any way different to using the AWS API to upload stuff to S3? Being a "storage solution provider" (and reselling other companies' cloud offerings at that) has some razor thin margins and a whole lot of competition. I don't understand what makes these guys different.

They talk about running their own hardware so assume something like open compute or backblaze. But without the size or reliability of S3. Can't imagine they'll be able to do it at lower cost than Amazon either. Like you I have no idea why not use S3.

Like you, I can't see how they'll compete on price if they own their own hardware. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook have all been working on this stuff for years. Even adopting Opencompute or similar, they will have comparatively no buying power, no users and no data.

Agreed. I don't understand this at all. The whole point of syncing was that it got around all the inherent limitations of requiring an always-on network connection in a client-server architecture. And now somehow going back to requiring a network connection to save data is an improvement?

They probably only want to provide B2B services, which prove valuable to offices full of workstations with deep pockets. Not consumer grade, residential drones like us.

Same Here...

If, but it is a big if, I have understand correctly it is a simple cloud service but it doesn't save your file in your hard drive, but directly and only on the cloud...