
Show HN: Bitbox.co – Cloud Storage for Developers - dcsadmin
I&#x27;ve decided to bite the bullet and release Bitbox.co and get some feedback. I&#x27;ve been coding for years and one of the things I constantly see companies do is write and rewrite a document storage system, so I decided to write one for them. Bitbox.co uses cloud storage (currently Azure) to store documents but can be coded to use any cloud service. Documents can be public or private and URLs to that document can be used directly in HTML. There are currently a list of WebAPIs for developers to use as a tool, or build an entire system around.<p>This is an MVP and it&#x27;s simple. Upload a file, get a token; like a valet or coat check. When you want that file back, send the token and you get a byte stream. There is also a built in file converter, so you can can upload a docx file and retrieve it as a pdf by appending .pdf to the URL, for example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bitbox.co&#x2F;files&#x2F;1.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bitbox.co&#x2F;files&#x2F;1.pdf</a>, or perhaps a tiff: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bitbox.co&#x2F;files&#x2F;1.tif" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bitbox.co&#x2F;files&#x2F;1.tif</a>. Files can be marked as public or private, and account owners can invite other users to join their team with read, write or admin privileges.<p>There are some directions I want to possibly go:<p><pre><code>  - Allow users to select their own cloud store (Azure, AWS, etc) rather than the built in store.
  - Allow users to replicate their files between cloud stores, so you would store your documents on all your cloud stores in Azure or AWS, etc.
  - Folder structures for organization
  - Integration with third party platforms like WordPress or SurgarCRM
  - Cookbook for code examples on how to connect through the WebAPI in various languages.
  - Local install so developers can use their internal SMB shares to store files.
  - File level security, and &#x2F; or folder level security for users &#x2F; files.
</code></pre>
This was designed for IT departments without a strong development team to save money. Does anyone have a need for something like this?<p>www.bitbox.co
======
crwalker
Quick thoughts:

\- I don't understand the value proposition relative to other cloud storage
providers

\- Hire someone to do your UX (could start with just landing page layout,
icons, and color theme)

\- Selling to developers is a challenge
([http://www.defmacro.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-
failed.html](http://www.defmacro.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.html))

\- Your pricing sets you up to compete on Gb/$/month which sounds like a hard
battle for any startup to win

\- Keep going!

~~~
akanet
I agree with this comment except for the keep going part. It seems you've
spent a lot of time building this but not a lot of time considering the value
proposition. I think there is nobility in stopping projects, and this one
seems liable to eat another year of your life if you continue as you have.

~~~
sixhobbits
This is harsh. Any creator knows the feeling of pouring time and effort into
something, the anticipation of showing it to people, the excitement of making
people happy, the doubts of being judged and criticised. And the crushing
feeling of seeing negative feedback.

I appreciate that you're trying to save some kind of longer-term pain and to
encourage loss-cutting, but I think the tradeoff of the damage you can do with
a two sentence comment that takes a couple of seconds to fire off vs the
hundreds of hours that went into creating something like this, far outweighs
the potential benefit (though it seems the creator took it graciously).

To me it seems like a "benefit of the doubt" applies here. The creator
obviously saw a need and tried to fill it. As someone who has spent hundreds
of hours dealing with Dropbox and S3 APIs, I believe there definitely is room
for a far simpler service. Sometimes you just want to dump a file somewhere
and retrieve it.

This looks to me like it could grow into the sqlite of the filestorage world,
where Dropbox is probably the MySQL. It looks slightly rough around the edges,
but very promising, and I will be watching development with great interest.

~~~
akanet
Benefit of the doubt is not a good heuristic for evaluating whether a business
venture is a good idea.

~~~
dcsadmin
I appreciate your candor exactly for the reason you stated. I need to know
whether to spend more time on it, or move on to something else.

I'm not quite sure how to analyze the results as a whole though.

------
burlesona
Seems like a nice idea, it’s not obvious to me why an IT team would need this
over any other flavor of cloud storage available currently. Do you have a
first customer that you built this for? How do they use it?

~~~
dcsadmin
I've built one of these several times for larger companies. They need a place
to store millions of documents that integrates with their multiple existing
internal systems. These documents would come in from fax, email or integration
services.

A benefit this has over cloud storage is that you can store your files across
cloud vendors; so it would have cloud vendor redundancy. If Amazon goes down,
it will pull files from Azure, and vice versa. This is a future feature if
this gets any traction.

Other things it might have over a cloud storage is you can assign tokens with
different access levels, so your applications that need read only will be
assigned read only tokens and your applications that need read/write can use
read/write tokens.

Larger customers that aren't interested in the cloud or are cloud averse with
their sensitive documents can do a local install and have it store on a share
inside their own network, so the method of storage is mutable; Azure, AWS,
SMB, even FTP.

You can also assign searchable metadata to each document, or upload a bunch of
documents with the same metadata. So say you have a referral of some sort and
it has 20 documents; you can upload all 20 and assign a meta tag as
ReferralID: 123, then reference those documents in searches.

There is also a built in file conversion.

~~~
gruez
>A benefit this has over cloud storage is that you can store your files across
cloud vendors; so it would have cloud vendor redundancy. If Amazon goes down,
it will pull files from Azure, and vice versa. This is a future feature if
this gets any traction.

azure has secondary region built into their blob solution, which is
essentially what you're describing. and considering your site has a bunch of
moving parts (multi-cloud, file conversion, search, etc.), I'm not really
convinced that you'll be more reliable than the cloud provider. in other
words, you'll be the cause of downtime more often than s3 failing.

>Other things it might have over a cloud storage is you can assign tokens with
different access levels, so your applications that need read only will be
assigned read only tokens and your applications that need read/write can use
read/write tokens.

aws/azure iam handles this.

>Larger customers that aren't interested in the cloud or are cloud averse with
their sensitive documents can do a local install and have it store on a share
inside their own network, so the method of storage is mutable; Azure, AWS,
SMB, even FTP.

but there are many storage appliances (what you're essentially describing) out
there, including open source ones like owncloud. what makes yours stand out?

~~~
rhencke
> azure has secondary region built into their blob solution, which is
> essentially what you're describing

How does Azure's secondary region capability provide cloud _vendor_
redundancy?

~~~
gruez
It doesn't. But I don't think that's an issue considering providers wide
outages are exceedingly rare. Even last year's massive AWS outage was isolated
to us-east-1.

~~~
makapuf
A providers outage can also be named a price hike, a change in license or a
security breach. In that case you might want your data out of the provider
asap.

~~~
gruez
if the software is cloud agnostic, wouldn't a simple copy operation between
the cloud providers suffice?

>security breach

if you want to reduce your attack surface, copying your data across multiple
providers is counter-productive. instead of having to hack your specific cloud
provider, the attacker only needs to hack one of many cloud providers.

~~~
zaarn
In some cases a copy might not be viable, especially with price hikes. If AWS
increased storage and outgoing data costs greatly then exporting all your data
will most likely cause a much larger bill.

Splitting your data across multiple vendors protects against all kinds of
failures from all sides (including the vendor simply closing your account for
no reason)

------
505aaron
Congratulations on the launch. Some constructive criticism. Give your website
some design love. It doesn't look like a company website. It looks like a side
project right now. If I came across this site on my own I wouldn't even think
about entering my credit card info.

I hope this doesn't come across as too harsh. I sincerely wish you the best!

------
sandGorgon
If you can build a dataroom product for startup founders to run fundraising (
[https://blog.ycombinator.com/process-and-leverage-in-
fundrai...](https://blog.ycombinator.com/process-and-leverage-in-fundraising/)
) similar to [https://www.box.com/business/virtual-data-
room/](https://www.box.com/business/virtual-data-room/), that would be cool.

A data room for fundraising with an API, GDPR, etc

------
buremba
I'm not in our target customer audience but here is my take:

1\. You should probably work on the landing page and try to make it look like
an enterprise product.

2\. Your target audience is obviously enterprise companies so you should
probably need outbound sales strategies unless you open-source the app and
spend at least two years for visibility.

3\. The main problem is that your target audience probably has enough
resources to build their own solution and if the privacy is important for
them, they probably won't be willing to try out your service. You need to do a
market research and maybe build an on-prem version of the app.

4\. You should probably spend some time to find the best value proposition for
your product. Here are a few ideas that can help you to find it:

* Make it so simple for the companies can integrate it easily within hours. You should probably make the system pluggable so that they can integrate their internal services easily and switch to cloud if they want.

* Give away some free carrots to them in order to attract the potential customers. (Maybe open-source?)

* Do some paid POC and work as a consulting company. If you get closer to your customers, it can help you to find out the actual problem and turn your company into a product company. (i.e. Do Things that Don't Scale)

------
Drytin
> you can reference the endpoints directly in your HTML, so <img
> src="[https://bitbox.co/files/1.png">](https://bitbox.co/files/1.png">) >
> There is also a built in file conversion.

How do these work in conjunction with each other? Could I just request
[https://bitbox.co/files/1.jpg](https://bitbox.co/files/1.jpg)?

~~~
dcsadmin
Yes.

------
lapnitnelav
So is it like S3/Object storage with a convenience layer on top?

If you're targeting IT departments, I'd look into :

-Integrating with directories (AD / LDAP / ...)

-Search feature (ELK? Algolia?)

-Integrating with mail platforms (the on premise ones for example)

-Backup solutions

As others have stated, I don't think what you provide is the best fit for your
target.

So instead you should probably look at what problems those guys have and the
list above is merely a guess as to what keeps this might be for your average
IT team.

Also, while you're trying to get the IT teams to want your product, it's
ultimately the execs which will have to sign on that, so you should make sure
you convey business value to those guys. Because right now, it's not obvious.

Hope this helps.

------
Boulth
Sounds really cool. Does it support remoteStorage? [0]

[0]: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-dejong-
remotestorage-09](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-dejong-remotestorage-09)

~~~
dcsadmin
Not currently, but it will definitely go on the future feature list. Thanks
for the tip.

------
explodingcamera
What's the benefit over using something like s3 or Blob Storage directly? It
seems like they all support your features in some way

------
sigi45
On your main page there is no info about any clients.

Not sure why i should use your service over one of the following:

\- Office 365 Sharepoint or OneDrive \- Dropbox \- Box \- Google Drive

In my previous company, we used box. One of the biggest issues was the client.
For cases like images for a website or other stuff, we used S3 directly.

I personaly wouldn't use it in my it department. i would use nextcloud or one
named above.

~~~
dcsadmin
Can you elaborate on the client issues? We decided to go with WebAPI for
universal access. Also, for public images, you can reference the endpoints
directly in your HTML, so <img
src="[https://bitbox.co/files/1.png">](https://bitbox.co/files/1.png">)

~~~
sigi45
S3 has an api and there are libraries out there how to use it. It has access
policys, access tokens with different permission level. Everything you have
but better.

Now what you don't have, is a client software which allows any employee to use
your storage system easy.

Only a WebAPI is not enough. I would even prefer any S3 open source self
hosting solution over your solution and put a backup strategy behind it.

------
WhiteOwlLion
I could run some IPFS nodes giving me 1TB of storage for $10/month per node.
There's no scale here and you could easily DIY more storage for far less cost.
Look at online.net or scaleway or ovh if you want to roll your own easily.

------
iovrthoughtthis
I would open up your search to different markets.

You have a significant body of work that solves a problem you perceive.

I'm not sure that the people you think will value it are the people who value
it.

Why did you have to build one at your previous companies? Who drove that
decision?

~~~
dcsadmin
>Who drove that decision?

Centralized storage, accessibility, abstraction and usage tracking of all
corporate documents sourced from all divisions / systems with proper access
controls and redundancy. (That's a lot of business speak).

I've seen this done with a network share / filesystem or as blobs inside an
RDBMS; both of which start to fall apart after a certain volume for different
reasons. Especially after building a company through acquisitions of various
systems. The first step in merging systems acquired through M&A would be to
migrate all the documents into a centralized repository (like bitbox).

These systems usually have an auto-kill feature after X years which would be
the legally required time to keep a document. Companies would purge the
documents to avoid any unnecessary liability after the required retention
period (incase they got sued).

Also, they were interested in hot and cold storage, so documents that are say
over a month old would get moved to cold storage (or whatever the company
workflow dictates) to save money on storage costs (hot = SSD, cold =
mechanical).

I was thinking integration would be useful if this got any foothold. Integrate
with email servers, scanners, existing sites with upload capabilities, etc. It
also keeps a history of everything that happened to a file.

Unfortunately the B2B enterprise sales cycle is brutal and I wanted to avoid
that until we got bigger; funding the company through subscriptions of smaller
companies that may not have the technical expertise to build a robust system,
but still has the need of document storage.

~~~
iovrthoughtthis
I understand "why" it's valuable. I meant who in the company!

That would give you persona to look for when marketing / reaching out.

------
keynan
I'd like to have an aws glacier backup tool. I'd expect it to be open source,
and be simple enough to read over. If it encrypts and decrypts documents too
that's a plus

------
biswajitsharma
Change the Subject to Show HN , might get more attention. Good Luck!

~~~
dcsadmin
Done. Thanks for the tip.

------
handbanana
Looks interesting! One thing, why do I keep seeing mention of WebAPI and not
just simply API?

------
randomsofr
Looks good, but put some work on the marketing side.

------
digianarchist
Currently not many cloud storage systems support cryptocurrencies. Might be an
easy way to win more customers.

~~~
jhasse
Seafile accepted Bitcoins, not sure if they still do.
[https://bravenewcoin.com/news/seafile-accepts-bitcoin-
after-...](https://bravenewcoin.com/news/seafile-accepts-bitcoin-after-paypal-
shenanigans/)

~~~
digianarchist
Seafile.de doesn't even work.

~~~
jhasse
The company split, I think the German entity no longer exists. Seafile can now
be found at: [https://seafile.com](https://seafile.com)

~~~
manveru
The German entity is now [https://syncwerk.com/](https://syncwerk.com/)

