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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

"That's not the kind of company I'm going to trust with my data. What other kind of BS are they going to try to pull if they're willing to do something like this before I'm even a customer?"

I am sorry if that is confusing - it is not in any way meant to be a dark pattern or misleading.

We can't charge people, for instance, 30 cents per month (as in your example) - the fees or processing your card (or paypal payment) would be larger than that.

The minimum order of 500 GB computes to $10 per month. If you have a very tight budget, please email info@rsync.net and I will personally figure out a way (annual payment, whatever) to make it work for you. It will be larger than 15 GB, however, unless you want to pay 5 years in advance.

I was just about to change the wording on the pricing page to be "500-9999 GB" but that's even more confusing, IMO ... I think most people understand that processing fees dictate a minimum order ...

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>We can't charge people, for instance, 30 cents per month (as in your example) - the fees or processing your card (or paypal payment) would be larger than that.

You can - you just need to eliminate the card processing from most transactions in these cases. Allow users to top up a balance with a minimum buy-in that meets your processing threshold, and decrement that balance as services are consumed.

This does require some degree of effort in terms of implementation and accounting, but it drastically increases the appeal of your service to small businesses and personal users.

tarsnap does something like that - https://www.tarsnap.com/

> This does require some degree of effort in terms of implementation and accounting

I feel like you're really downplaying what would be involved. It is a great suggestion, but the effort to manage and implement doesn't sound trivial. Personally, the few systems that exclusively use this model drive me nuts. Instead of just paying for what I want I have to add to this account, then pay for what I want.

For the business owner, they now have to account for and secure new account balances. At a large scale (Starbucks has $1.6 billion [1]), you can likely cover any additional regulatory and accounting costs and also make money. On a small scale it can be a liability that costs more than it brings in.

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/jp_koning/status/1160387043790413...

Dealing with customer accounts that carry a credit is a rather mundane and common bookkeeping exercise. Experienced accountants are unlikely to balk at such a suggestion.

Just to give an anecdote - rsync.net has been in this business for a long time. From their own site:

> rsync.net began providing cloud storage for offsite backups in the fall of 2001, for our original corporate parent, JohnCompanies.

> In 2006, we became a stand-alone firm dedicated only to offsite backup. We provide this simple product and nothing else.

I set up rsync.net with a previous employer a decade ago and I am quite certain that all of the automation set up at that time is probably still functioning flawlessly.

Never had a single issue, it Just Worked from day one and provided us with off-site backups using trivial technology that took me scant minutes to set up.

It may not have the glitz of Amazon S3 and such, but the raw simplicity of the product + the stellar track record of the provider is very compelling.

Just to give an anecdote - Church of Scientology has been in business for 65 years.

Have you had successful dealings with them?

For the record, I doubt that you were trying to mislead anyone. I clicked through because I thought to myself, "There's no way they can sell 15 GB of storage for 30 cents/month."

It looks like a good service for those with moderate and large data storage needs, but it would be better to be clear about that from the start. I know a lot of people that will test these services with smaller amounts of data before making a commitment.

I was similarly surprised as the original commenter (without so much drama). I am just starting to look for Offline storage ideas for important files for my very very early startup And I thought rsync.net was very cool. However I think right now I will have at most 10 GB, but given that there is no option for that, I will have to concentrate the development efforts to integrate with GCS + S3 to have the offsite redundancy I have.

I think you guys could benefit form "early adoption" people like me. My company might not be a very big client now, as with any startup, we plan to grow and thus our offsite storage requirements. But for me, I prefer to spend the dev-time to integrate with a provider early once, preferably in something that will last for a long time (so I don't have to spend dev time again soon)

Please email info@rsync.net. I will personally figure out a way to get you onboard at a price-point / duration that works for you.

I feel that you guys/gals/polar bears are great. Just had to say. You really can see the dedication and lack of cynicalness. That's all. Not a customer just a commenter. Data is already safe here. But you seem really great

You can use rclone to easily backup to multiple popular services.

I, too, would pay upfront annually for something smaller than 500 GB.

$15/yr for 50?

Can you just let people prepay a certain amount and deduct from that every month? You don't want to charge 30 cents a month, but I'd happily prepay $10-15 and have it deducted from the total every month.

If the problem is not wanting to support a bunch of small accounts, I totally get that, but if the problem is credit card fees every month, there are lots of ways to avoid that.

You don't need to mean for something to be a dark pattern or be misleading.

Charge $1/m and annually.

You could easily eliminate the card processing fees by accepting crypto currency

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