
Tarsnap - Why picodollars? - jacquesm
http://www.tarsnap.com/picoUSD-why.html
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lrm242
I love tarsnap. Its, by far, one of the best tools I've adopted in the last
year or two. The service is simple and easy to understand. The tool works
great, has great documentation, and makes sense to my unix brain. And the
price is fair and straightforward. I prepaid the minimum amount, $5, and have
backed up 189 GB of data and still have $2.603332060102213400 available on my
account. How can that be? Well, one last reason why tarsnap rocks: it
deduplicates the data automatically.

Great job, Colin. I've been recommending it to everyone I know. Keep it up.

~~~
cperciva
_I've been recommending it to everyone I know_

Thanks! This is very important to me -- both because such recommendation tells
me that I'm doing something right, and because Tarsnap's target user base is a
very hard one to reach by any method _other_ than word of mouth.

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Jim_Neath
When I first looked at tarsnap a few days back, one of the first things I
thought was "What the hell is a picodollar?"

So I gave up on the idea.

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ajju
Tarsnap is the one service which I log on to once in several weeks and
go..Wha! How the hell did I spend so _little_ money in all this time?

ps. Note to cperciva - Speaking as a customer, please don't take this as a
sign that you should raise your prices.

pps.: Note 2 to cperciva: Speaking as a fellow entrepreneur, how can you _not_
raise your prices? ;)

~~~
cperciva
_Speaking as a customer, please don't take this as a sign that you should
raise your prices._

Don't worry, I have no intention of raising prices. Tarsnap is not wildly
profitable, but it is profitable -- and the most feasible way to make more
money is to get more customers, not to increase prices and probably lose
customers.

 _Speaking as a fellow entrepreneur, how can you not raise your prices? ;)_

As I said above: Raising my prices would probably be a bad business move. That
said, I make no guarantees that my prices will come down every time that my
costs come down (as they inevitably will over time), so my profit margin might
increase in that way.

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nkohari
It's nice that you shared the reasons for using the picodollar, but I'd never
buy your product because it's not blatantly obvious how much it costs. No
offense intended.

~~~
cperciva
_it's not blatantly obvious how much it costs_

The front page of the tarsnap website says

    
    
      Storage:
        300 picodollars / byte-month
        ($0.30 / GB-month)
      Bandwidth:
        300 picodollars / byte
        ($0.30 / GB)
    

Even if you don't know what the pico- prefix means, I'm not sure how you could
be confused by the $/GB pricing...

~~~
moe
It's still confusing and redundant. Just write $0.30 / GB and that's it.
Nobody cares if they will be paying 5 cent or 3,789 cent a month for their
small-scale backups.

Also a little javascript calculator, right there on the frontpage, would be a
nice gimmick.

~~~
shrughes
_It's still confusing and redundant. Just write $0.30 / GB and that's it._

Edit: Okay, $0.30 / GB / month

~~~
moe
Well, $.30 / GB / Month, to be precise. The "storage over time"-part is just
very hard to communicate in a single sentence. Hence the javascript
calculator. Give them a small box where they can tack in GB's and number of
days and see for themselves.

Just avoid confronting your potential customer with terms he has never heard.
"Don't make me think" applies here.

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davidw
Hrm. That information is useless though... people think in terms of GB, which
is indeed also listed on the front page...

~~~
jacquesm
It definitely isn't useless, the billing is in terms of that, so a tiny backup
will cost you a tiny bit of money.

Anyway, I thought it was really neat.

It sets a new standard for honesty in business. No rounding required.

~~~
cperciva
_No rounding required._

That's not quite true. Tarsnap does billing computations daily, so -- in
months which do not contain 30 days -- there is some rounding.

However, usage costs are computed to attodollar precision, and are rounded
_down_ \-- so I don't think anyone will object to said rounding. :-)

~~~
jacquesm
I'm really happy I'm not in competition with you, you set the bar rather high
:)

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Hexstream
ARGHHHH I finally decided to use Tarsnap and it happens that it's not
available in Canada :/

~~~
cperciva
Send me an email and I might be able to help you out.

