You know what? Newsflash to all the brilliant people trying to make a mint by playing S3 middlemen... You're one free-software client from being irrelevant. $10/month is enough to motivate me to hack in my spare time. At $3/month... meh, maybe I'll scratch a different itch.
Try to hack up a replacement to tarsnap in your spare time and you are a lot more likely to embarass yourself than to give Colin a run for his money. S3 isn't the underlying value in Tarsnap.
You are right that Tarsnap's website does a terrible job communicating the value. You're wrong about everything else. But I'm glad Colin is getting the data point here.
Yes: Tarsnap is extremely secure, and so it can be used inside companies with sensitive data without wasting time classifying what can and can't be backed up remotely.
For the sake of argument (or, because you trust me on this), let's stipulate that Tarsnap is significantly more secure than duplicity; things can go wrong with duplicity (or create untenable administrative headaches) that don't with Tarsnap.
Tarsnap isn't just an S3 middleman. The Tarsnap client-server API is considerably more powerful (e.g., transactions, amortized S3 PUT costs) and you can't replicate the functionality on the client alone.
$7 a month for how much of your time? $7 for me is less than 10 minutes of time a month and I graduated school in May, it's not like I'm making an outrageous salary. $7 is the difference between going out to Subway for lunch or making a sandwhich in the morning, which is a decision I base every single day solely on how I feel when I wake up in the morning.
When you go to subway do you pay for the sandwich or do you subscribe to a $x/month recurring charge that gives you up to y sandwiches/month whether you eat them or not?
