
The Space Monkey Upgrade Scam - emil10001
http://www.recursiverobot.com/post/71819621340/the-space-monkey-upgrade-scam
======
alenlpeacock
Hi there, I work for Space Monkey. Let me shed some light on all this.

The _vast majority_ of our Kickstarter backers have responded overwhelmingly
positively to the offer. In fact, we extended the offer in large part because
Kickstarter backers asked over and over again "can you make it so that we can
own the device instead of lease it?"

The percentage of backers that have already converted from the $120/year plan
to the $49/year plan is huge. We take this to mean that we did the right
thing.

Having said that, we aren't forcing anyone to upgrade. If users want to stay
on the $120/yr plan, we're happy to let them do that.

All users who are unhappy with this, or who were confused about device
ownership are welcome to a refund. John included.

~~~
emil10001
What is your definition of 'responding positively'? Does that mean taking the
offer? Because for some people, they might take the offer, but still be
annoyed about it. They might also not have realized the issue that I'm
pointing out.

I'm also leaning towards getting a refund at this point. I spent a fair amount
of time going back and forth with your CS, hoping that the situation would
improve, but instead of admitting that you screwed up on Kickstarter and
didn't make your intentions clear, your CS reps dug in their heels and are
claiming something that is simply not true - that you own these devices.

------
yaakov34
Having read the post, I honestly do not see anything that remotely approaches
a "scam". You need to be more careful with words, or maybe just to learn to
take disagreements or disappointments more in stride, and to maybe try to see
things from others' perspectives.

What you have here is some kind of disappointment in an upgrade offer; Space
Monkey, as far as I see, is a) still honoring the offer it gave you on
Kickstarter, and b) is willing to refund you the whole sum in any case. That's
not a "scam". I kept reading this article and waiting to see how Space Monkey
stole your data and sold it to advertisers and identity thieves (that would be
a scam), but, instead, you're basically displeased with them and their
phrasing was possibly unclear.

When you raise that to the level of "scam" and spend who-knows-how-much effort
on writing 13 long back-and-forth emails and a blog post (at what rate do you
value your time that you find this worthwhile for a $10/month service?), you
just make yourself sound like a spoiled child.

FWIW, I have nothing to do with Space Monkey and have never even heard of them
before 10 minutes ago.

~~~
jrs99
i don't think it's about the money. it's almost never about the money.

if you had a ten dollar bill on a table, and you saw an acquaintance take that
money and put it in their pocket, you confronted them about it, and they told
you it was theirs and that they didn't take anything, would you be a spoiled
child by ending the relationship or asking for the money back?

~~~
zeeboo
But they offered to give the money back and he didn't take it.

~~~
jrs99
They could always just go ahead and give him the money back.

~~~
zeeboo
Space Monkey said they would give refunds with shipment at their cost to
anyone who requests them.

~~~
jrs99
If they are completely straightforward, it would have saved someone a trip to
the post office.

companies cause stress when you can't trust them. You don't have 100%
confidence that you'll even get a refund. You don't know what they're capable
of if they are even misleading you by accident.

When the company gets annoyed or mad, then how do you trust them when you send
back your data? You can't.

the worst feeling is that you feel that you are taken advantage of, even
subtly.

------
jsaxton86
Here's what Space Monkey promised on their kickstarter page[1]: "Space Monkey
is the next generation cloud. For $10 per month, you get a full Terabyte (1000
Gigabytes) of storage you can use anywhere, any time."

No device is promised, and even after re-reading his blog post, I'm not sure
what emil10001's argument is. He feels he owned his Space Monkey, because
what? Because he felt that he should own it? Because there wasn't a big red
font on the kickstarter page that said "YOU DO NOT OWN THE DEVICE!!!"?

Maybe emil10001 has a point and Space Monkey is running a huge scam. That, of
course, is premised on the assumption that Space Monkey sold him a device,
then insisted he didn't own it. Emil10001 has provided no evidence that this
is the case. That's not hyperbole, go reread his blog post. It's like a kid
throwing a temper tantrum because he isn't getting his way. I can't believe
this is getting upvoted on HN.

[1]: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/clintgc/space-monkey-
tak...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/clintgc/space-monkey-taking-the-
cloud-out-of-the-datacente)

~~~
6d0debc071
> No device is promised

\------------------

"Early-bird special. 1 Terabyte of Space Monkey storage for 12 months (device
included in your subscription)."

Obviously there are two ways of taking that -

1) You don't have to buy a device to use the service

or

2) that the purchase of the device is included in the subscription.

Considering the trivial nature of claim 1, claim 2 is not an entirely
unreasonable interpretation for someone to have come to.

~~~
alenlpeacock
Unfortunately, the Kickstarter platform does not allow you to change the
descriptions for reward levels once you've pushed the project live (you can
add new rewards, but cannot remove or modify old ones).

This KS policy makes sense: they don't want people doing switch-n-bait on
rewards.

But the very real consequence is that _if_ the wording on a reward was not
100% clear, the _only_ option Space Monkey had after publishing it was to add
text to the product description on the main page, in the forums, or in
updates. This is how Kickstarter works. Our hands were tied from changing that
text, _even though we wanted to_.

------
huslage
* Who owns the device?

They own the device until they say you own it. Period. As with anything you
buy these days. You have a use-license to things until you are told you own
it. Most EULAs for hardware explicitly state this somewhere or another.

* Is the offer reasonable?

Totally. They are giving you a bonus on top of the better deal that they give
new customers.

* Should I be upset about this?

No. I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill.

* Should I just send it back and ask for a refund?

If you feel like this is a real issue to you, then yes.

* What should I do???﻿

Making a big deal out of this is really sort of knee-jerk, it seems. You
misunderstood what you were getting and now you're asking the company you got
it from to do something they clearly aren't prepared to do (give you stuff for
free). Just because you make a fuss on the Internet doesn't mean you always
get your way.

SpaceMonkey seems to be an honorable business with good intentions. I have not
backed them, nor am I a customer, but it seems to me that you've changed their
good deal into something that it's not.

------
incision
I was an early backer on Kickstarter and had certainly been working under the
idea that I "own" the device - with the understanding that it would be useless
without an ongoing subscription.

I never actually read into any of the upgrade emails, so seeing this is a
surprise and a bit of a disappointment that such an offer would be time-
limited, but I can't say I feel scammed.

Perhaps I'm naive, but I do actually buy into the idea that Kickstarter is
place to support good, wouldn't-exist-otherwise ideas with an expectation of
some friction along the way.

SpaceMonkey is something that immediately impressed me as one of those ideas
with an exceptional backing price relative to what I pay in total for similar
functionality. What I got was in many ways better than expected, very slick,
device, clients, apps - end to end.

Sure, as a backer I'd prefer to be "given" the device outright in light of the
pricing model for new buyers, but who knows how feasible that is? It's a
$350,000 Kickstarter I'm dealing with, not some multinational. I have to
expect that the $200,000 that these upgrades might generate are a calculated
if not necessary ask - not some kind of scammy money grab.

In the end, I'll probably buy into the upgrade deal if/when it comes around
again.

------
antr
This is a great example of a startup not running their numbers due to the lack
of a business plan, running the numbers post-Kickstarter campaign after
thousands of people have pledged and millions of dollars raised, and finding
out that their economics do not add up.

Now they are backpedalling on their promise, leaving 95% of their
current/future customers with a really bad experience. Had it been a SaaS
business, I don't think this issue would have escalated as much, but given a
sense of "ownership" is involved, users are not that happy; and it's
understandable. Add to that that users don't have their encryption keys, but
SpaceMonkey, a US company, has them... both issues mixed make a great backlash
cocktail.

I personally see this business opportunity as one BitTorrent Inc. should make
the most of it. They know the protocol, they have the distribution, surely
there must be an off-the-shelf _a la_ RPi solution, with great
reliability/redundancy that could be taken mainstream.

~~~
alenlpeacock
We haven't backpedalled on anything. The original rewards offered on
Kickstarter stand. We will honor all backer rewards as originally offered.

We simply believe that the offering we are now giving to new customers is
better in most ways than the one we gave to Kickstarter backers, so we wanted
to let them in on the sweet action too, at their choice.

And to say thanks for backing us early, we threw in an extra 6 months of
service ($60 value under their current plan), free, if they took us up on the
offer.

We thought we were being cool about this, and the vast majority of our
Kickstarter backers _do_ think we are being cool about it, voting in support
of this offer with their very real dollars by upgrading.

Those who are upset by this offer are _very few_ in number, and we've offered
refunds to all of them.

What else do you think we should do?

~~~
antr
Not mentioning on the campaign that the device is a lease, rental, etc., and
now saying it is, to me, is backpedalling. Add to that the fact that
SpaceMonkey never mentioned the cost of the plan post-1 year during the entire
campaign, and months after. From the outside that comes across as if the
entire cost structure was to be determined, and it sure seems to me that that
was the case.

~~~
alenlpeacock
The _very first sentence_ of the Kickstarter page says, "Space Monkey is the
next generation cloud. For $10 per month, you get a full Terabyte (1000
Gigabytes) of storage you can use anywhere, any time."

~~~
jbellis
I know the Space Monkey guys from working together at Mozy and I can vouch
that they wouldn't be deliberately misleading about this.

------
blaze33
1\. Is there some open protocol for a distributed storage of this kind ?

2\. Or a plan to open the space monkey protocol ? À la dotcloud giving us
docker. I don't believe you can change "how the world stores data, forever"
without opening it.

I kinda like the idea but for it to really shines, I would like to see it
survive the Space Monkey company. I would also see this more in line with the
Internet design philosophy mentioned in kickstarter.

ie. being able to plug whatever hard drives I happen to have, share a portion
to backup peoples data and in exchange have the rest of the available space
backuped, remote accessible, being able to bring and plug my ssd to work for
fast access if needed (no doubt about who-owns-the-device there), etc.

3\. How big is the space monkey HDD to store your 1TB plus bits of a resilient
backup of the other devices ? How does it compare to a local RAID setup ?

4\. How are reliability, availability, performance and capacity balanced ?

~~~
alenlpeacock
1\. there have been several attempts (including two of my own!), but it's an
ambitious project

2\. yes, we're actually very interested internally in opening up large parts
of the system long term. We're also very interested in creating a system that
could outlive the company.

3\. internal drives are currently 2-4TB. It's better than RAID. RAID is
susceptible to correlated failures, does not survive fire, theft, or flood,
and is much more labor intensive (swapping out failed drives within short
windows, rebuilding arrays, etc).

4\. Reliability/availability: all chunks of data are encrypted, chopped up
into dozens of pieces with parity data added, and spread to dozens of
locations (currently 40), only _half_ of which need to be present for complete
recovery. When availability of those pieces drops below a certain level, a
self-healing process automatically recreates the missing bits. Performance:
data can be streamed from the network at a high data rate, and we're currently
at more than 10x the speed of competing cloud services for getting data into
Space Monkey, but there's lots of room for improvement (we're not as fast as a
local NAS yet, but soon will be)!

~~~
blaze33
Thanks for your detailed answer! I wish you a Happy New Year and good luck
with your project, definitely one I'll be following this year.

------
emil10001
Please have a read and then help me out by giving me some advice, because I’m
completely sick of thinking about this:

* Who owns the device?

* Is the offer reasonable?

* Should I be upset about this?

* Should I just send it back and ask for a refund?

* What should I do???﻿

~~~
rckclmbr
Space Monkey employee here, although I wasn't the one that created the
subscription rules(I'm a software dev).

* For people who bought the Kickstarter, Space Monkey technically owns the device. We realized this isn't what most people wanted or expected, so if you buy on the site today, YOU own the device.

* In my opinion, yes.

* From a statistical standpoint, most people understood they were leasing the device and were happy we offered an upgrade. The ones who thought they owned the device are upset. We're trying hard to do everything we can to make our customers happy (while still staying in business)

* We want our customers to be happy, if that means refunding you.

* I can't answer that for certain, but I would say do whatever makes you happy.

~~~
gregd
It would have made more sense for KS backers at the $99 level and up, simply
own the device now. As it stands, I can visit the site and pay $199 for said
device (ownership) and it comes with the 1 year of service. Quite honestly
this whole debacle has left me with a sour taste in my mouth and I highly
doubt I'll be renewing when my year is up, especially given that I have to pay
$149/year I believe..

~~~
rckclmbr
$99 KS is a great deal. Device ownership costs more upfront, but cheaper long
term. There's really three options for you:

1\. $99 + $120/year (not $149). First year is free.

2\. $99 + $79 (upgrade) + $49/year. First year is free. We included 6 months
additional service with this offer.

3\. Return $99 device, pay $200 up front + $49/year. First year is free. This
is basically #2, but more expensive, and no 6 months free.

~~~
kubiiii
There is a huge gap between the yearly fees of option 1 & 2\. I might miss
something but if the business model was based on ~ $10/month/user how come it
is still viable with ~ $ 4?

~~~
zeeboo
When you lease the device if the hardware fails then Space Monkey replaces it.
If you own the device and it fails outside of the 1yr warranty, then you have
to replace it. The difference is about recouping hardware costs over the
lifetime of the device.

~~~
_mikz
This should be written in the email they sent out! Thanks for clarification.

------
aghull
Space Monkey's wording maybe could have been better, but I understood it as
they intended and they appear to be dealing with a customer issue in a very
reasonable manner.

It's a little discouraging that public "exposés" of startups seems to be the
cool new thing on HN and that this is so high up on the front page.

------
octatone2
Did you sign a lease or contract for said device?

~~~
emil10001
Nope. There was no lease or contract. I asked them about that too, they
ignored that question.

~~~
alenlpeacock
There was also no stated warranty at the time you backed (there is now), yet
we replaced a device for you that failed, free of charge and without any
hassle.

We have acted in good faith with you at every step of the process. I'm sorry
it didn't work out in the end, but I'm at a loss what more we could have done.
I think we've spent more money paying people to try to answer your questions
than we ever took from your Kickstarter pledge.

~~~
octatone2
That was something you chose to do, just like sending out devices without
leases or contracts was a choice you made. I don't see how you have any legal
grounds to request that he give the device back to you.

------
logicallee
What people here think about actually leasing a device (clearly stated that
this is happening) along with a plan like this? Would it make sense?

Of course switching what happened from "you get a device with your
subscription" to "you're allowed to use our device while subscribed" is a huge
clawback. That's not what I'm asking - if they had started with the latter
model, what do you think, would it work in such cases?

------
GhotiFish
scam?

Change the title.

That is completely unacceptable. That's very click-bait, and very disparaging
to Space Monkey, who as far as I can tell, is operating in good faith. There
is going to be a whole lot of people who are going to get the wrong idea
without actually reading the article.

Your problem is a kind of philosophical issue between owning and leasing, and
while I sympathize on that front, that is not carte blanc to accuse someone of
scamming.

~~~
emil10001
This is not a philosophical issue. The 'scam' in question is them trying to
sell me a device that I already own, and is already in my possession. To me,
that is a scam!

~~~
GhotiFish
your case isn't air tight at all, several levels of the society I exist in (
and I suspect the society you exist in ) has solid precedents on the concepts
of a lease.

It's a scam to you, and only you. No one would consider this a scam, and
dragging a company acting in good faith through the mud because your
philisophical issue with it is beyond childish. Grow up. If you want to argue,
do it maturely.

------
knodi
So if it breaks, replacement will be free right? (As long as sub is valid)

~~~
alenlpeacock
Yes, under the subscription plan, the company is responsible for reasonable
device replacement when they fail (if not due to abuse, etc).

That's why the subscription plan costs more: pure subscribers are subsidizing
device replacement costs (perhaps for users other than themselves).

Under the ownership model, devices come with a 1-yr minimum warranty (we may
service other components for free longer, e.g. harddrive has a longer warranty
from vendor -- we're still sorting out how to apply that).

