Their cost for the pod (which they say includes labor) comes out to 0.044/GB. The cost of redundancy is 3/20 drives, which would place the cost to 0.0517/GB of data. They are planning to charge 0.005/GB on the B2 service this is made for. That's 10-11 months to break even on the initial cost. Add electricity + maintenance costs (of which I have no idea what it is) and you get the break-even number. My guess is that it'd be 1 year. So however long each pod lasts past 1 year is gravy (aside from the electricity + maintenance costs).
Amazon S3 must be making a killing. As a customer you must be paying for the cost of the "pod" every 2 months.
Please excuse me while I buy stock in Amazon/Box/Dropbox/Backblaze/etc....
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As a aside, as a personal user if you store over 1TB you are getting storage at a cheaper cost than B2 users. If under 1 TB you'd be better of using B2.
Seems to me that the average storage per user must be well under 1 TB on their unlimited plans.