Spot on. We iterated on a similar product in this space: "privacy preserving", "self-hosted", "open source" etc. But focused on local AI indexing & search of personal videos and photos [0], rather than backups.
We ultimately shelved VideoNinja because we weren't able to find a sustainable business angle:
* Non-technical people simply don't care (happy locked into Apple / Google).
* Technical people understood the proposition, but are super stingy. Case in point, see the responses in this very thread: "$10 per year max; I can buy a HDD for less!". That's one (cheap) restaurant meal per year.
So I fully understand your decision to go "cloud". Although that immediately takes your product off the table for me personally. I want nothing of mine (of value) in the cloud.
I feel there must be a way to square that circle, the market exists.
I think until they've got a customer base and a proven model a happy median is to put the code in escrow and agree to give the source to paid licensees should the project be abandoned/more than x months without updates/whatever.
I currently have a self-hosted google photos clone and I only paid for the hardware. Highly recommend.
- Scene finding for directors/news channels. AP and other sources have a lot of material but you pretty much literally have to watch the entire video in order to find a good scene.
- Scene finding for the XXX crowd. Very underserved market.
- Scene finding for police/lawyers. While it may seem like the opposite of 'privacy preserving', defense attorneys are literally just swamped with video evidence in an attempt to make them give up. Similarly if you're suing a big company for something as simple as an on the job injury or harassment, and need to prove there's a pattern of harm... they'll give you everything and let you do the work of finding out that there was a pattern of bad behavior.
It's the kind of thing that'd be useful as an open source solution... or failing that having a company which is 100% neutral in operation is also good.
I'm currently using Microsoft for something like this because they're absolution massive and apart from their OpenAI division, they only care that what you process is legal.
What's the issue with the cloud if you encrypt client-side? It's off-site backup. Isn't it too risky to have your life's work on a few drives in the same location?
I suspect the way it usually happens is that somebody your parents trust (like you) tells them to sign up for a privacy-preserving backup service.
But who's going to tell them to do that? Do you have the money to pay for advertising?
Normally, I'd suspect it's the tech-savvy younger folks who'd tell them to buy something like this but with your pricing and lack of self-hosted options, I suspect you've alienated a large portion of the tech-savvy audience you need to advocate for your product.
We are hopeful that we will be able to reduce the pricing as we scale up and hit a critical mass.
> who's going to tell them to do that?
We plan to implement a referral program, similar to what Dropbox did, to incentivize existing customers to spread the word.
That said, you do bring up interesting points. To repeat, we aren't averse to the idea of maintaining a self-hosted variant. Just that due to our limited bandwidth we had to choose one direction over another. Having advocates is important and I suppose with time we will have clarity on how to best do this without stretching ourselves too thin.
Time will tell if it was the right way forward, but I just went with "you can't fight gravity" and built it the way folks expect it to be (ex: supabase / posthog / gitlab).
That being said, really really hoping for your success! It finally fills a MUCH needed gap in 2021 consumer image viewing software.
There are many many gaps in it right now. Synology is basically the only self-hosted photo solution that grandma could use. Honestly surprised that more people aren't taking advantage of the opportunity.
- Our 1TB plan costs only 3x the 100GB plan. This model works under the assumption that the average utilization of a 1TB plan (across all customers) will be ~30%.
- If we were to bring in an intermediary plan (say 500GB), we would have to increase the pricing of the 1TB plan (since at least 50% will now be utilized), and also set the price of the 500GB plan to at least 2x of the 100GB plan. Both plans now appear unattractive.
- Since Apple and Google don't support per GB billing yet (which IMO would have been the fairest way to go), we had to pick buckets, and the current ones seemed like the fairest possible.
I hope this makes sense.
What happens if you start by pricing all tiers "honestly" (i.e. reasonably profitable even at 100% utilization)? Have you determined that the market won't bear that pricing? If so, is there any way to meet in the middle?
In general, you may be erring a little too much on the side of asking some customers to grossly overpay for their actual utilization and, in practical terms, 100GB to 1TB is just an extremely wide gap, as evidenced by your parent's comment.
So, it seems that most who tip over into the 100GB - 1TB plan will be there, overpaying, for a long time. And, obviously, most people who make it to 1TB will pass through that range. So, if you do see a higher concentration of users in that range than at 1TB (as intuituon would suggest), then you're essentially "punishing" a plurality of your customers by asking them to subsidize a smaller group's pricing.
Failing other options, it may be better to do the inverse: raise the pricing of 1TB to accomodate a "friendlier" 500GB plan.
When I was looking at setting up a similar service, it seemed like you Backblaze B2+Cloudflare might well be the best combination. B2 will sell you storage at $5/TB, and you can get free bandwidth out to Cloudflare's network. It's against Cloudflare's terms to use free plan for image hosting that isn't just images as part of webpages. However, one of their staff members commented on a thread that they'd likely to be willing to set up a custom plan for a business who wanted to do this. And I'd bet that Cloudflare's bandwidth would be a lot cheaper than B2's.
Interestingly, Workers Unbound charges 0.045/GB which is more than B2's 0.01/GB.
A viable long term alternative could be Wasabi that offers free egress in return for a $6/TB plan. But we're waiting to see how things pan out before executing an expensive migration.
```
{
"code": "not_found",
"message": "/api/top_level_url_mapping",
"status": 404
```
The last I checked was a few months ago, not sure if things have been fixed now.
With Workers, we simply fetch the remote resource from B2 and return it back to the client, acting as a thin proxy.
If not you, someone will figure this out. Charging by the GB seems hard. What if instead your levels were: 1,000 photos 10,000 photos 100,000 photos
You might get people who store super high res files, but work that into the pricing.
Do you have any marketers to help you? Will be hard to navigate the messaging alone.
Photos can easily be 30 MB each or more, especially from dedicated cameras. If all photos were 30 MB it would cost $5.69 per year for 1,000 photos.
Not making any point, just calculated it for myself and thought to share.
You know it really gets me thinking about packages rather than GB for this service. Maybe there's a "family plan" opportunity here. Do families value anti-surveillance in general, or is it simply lone actors?
Just the idea of archetypes flashed through my mind. An opportunity to sell to difference audiences. What kind of algos do individuals need, pro photographers, families?
We don't have a problem with offering a self-hosted variant. But given our limited engineering bandwidth we had to take a call on who our target market should be, and we felt that it was more important to make privacy accessible to people like my mom and dad. Hence this direction.