I think you're missing a trick with the pricing. My guess is the real money will come once data is treated like a commodity. So the big, big money will be in brokerage's and exchanges.
Paying flat fees for access to repos is fundamentally thinking about the problem incorrectly.
We charge business and on-prem users in TB-sized blocks. So that part is variable cost, not flat. And we sell user seats in blocks of 10. What else should we be thinking about? We want to be fair and also price in a way that encourages sharing behind the firewall (e.g. shouldn't require manager approval to add every new user).
My feeling is brokering. Consider the market for wheat where there is pricing based on supply and demand. There are futures, options, etc.
Consider a NYSE for data. Why host the data? Be a discovery service both for the price and for brokering of access.
Data should not be priced on it's size to store/transfer. That is leaving huge money on the table. It should be priced based on what people are willing to pay for it.
Why not allow someone to pay for the option for exclusive resale rights of some weather data service? Then allow someone to make a profit off their ability to re-sale that data. etc.
You may not be well placed to do that now but someone is going to. And why would I go to you hoping to find specific data when I can go to a market full of data, full of data re-sellers, etc.
Spot on. I get where you're coming from. The value of data is whatever the buyer and seller agree upon. I was mostly taking about the value/price of the service.
I think the whole project is doomed, the technology is trivially clonable and the backend is a thin API over S3. Their best bet is an acquisition by Amazon etc. to become e.g. Elastic Data Packs
I don't be think that trivial tech means they are doomed. GitHub, for example, is basically a GUI around git with a social aspect. Many others have implemented the same features: GitLab, Gogs, BitBucket, etc. Yet GitHub has not failed. It's all about the execution.
GitHub solves a lot of performance bottlenecks, and codified forking. They didn’t write an app or client bindings, which it seems that quilt is giving away. It sounds to me like they have a great interface to a closed hosting platform, and they hope enough people won’t mind maybe paying to access their data in the future. Hence why I think a cloud provider is the most probable acquirer.
edit by ‘doomed’ I mean “hefty discount on employee stock options/wouldn’t put my own money into it”
Paying flat fees for access to repos is fundamentally thinking about the problem incorrectly.