"and tell you why pricing in pico dollars attracts pathological customers who are the worst possible people to sell online backup to"
When I saw the pico-dollars bit on the site I instantly knew this was not someone I wanted to do business with. The sort of person who tries to prove his intelligence constantly rarely has the ability to cut through the fat to get into the meat of the matter. They'll play in the weeds all day long, but never climb the mountain for a good view.
I agree with Patio11, buck up grow a pair and charge good money. It looks like you've got solid infrastructure, it just needs to be charged for and sold.
It's not even a smart pricing model; it's built on the assumption that the first "byte-month" costs as much and is as valuable to the end-user as the trillionth.
I never even thought about the pricing model. But you're right he isn't doing rent extraction properly. I merely saw how he presented himself with "picodollars" and thought to myself "I know this guy. He spent twenty minutes telling me about the great deal on peaches he got".[1]
Seriously, switch to $/Gig, and sell the hell out of it. I don't care how smart you are. Show me how you can make my life better/simpler then get the hell out of it.
1. True story. I've gained a good nose for these people and I just walk away after the first encounter.
There's also a mental barrier that comes up when you see something unusual. I don't think about my expenses in pico dollars and I don't think about my important data in bytes. The worst part for me is that at $0.30/GB for storage and bandwidth the cost seems so low that I really don't even care if I'm using a full GB or just 12 bytes. Charge me the $0.30 and be done with it. If I can't glance at the service and guestimate how much it would cost me I'm not going to stick around long enough to find out.
Of course, the other thing to note here is that restaurants don't put dollar signs next to prices because they don't want people sitting there thinking about how much it costs.
The word "picodollar" is basically a dollar sign with a <blink> tag around it.
I'm surprised you don't see the humour in a 'pico dollar'.
I thought - this guy has DJB sized balls, I really want to use it. portsnap was great, this will be too.
And I don't even have a beard.
Colin has a platinum backed BSD pedigree. Tarsnap appears to be aiming at BSD minded users in the first instance ie people who mostly know what they are doing. Colin's grown tarsnap out of what he knows, the BSD aesthetic. What you know is a really good place to start.
But now, to grow tarnap beyond the BSD commandline pico-niche, something I really hope Colin does, because he's earned the success, it could / should adopt a Jungledisk like model. With an OS X desktop client, clearer pricing, and Apple level UX/marketing. And clients for home storage devices like Qnaps etc. And yes he should charge much more for that. Tarsnap does seem bizarrely, wonderfully cheap. And long may it remain that way... on the commandline.
When I saw the pico-dollars bit on the site I instantly knew this was not someone I wanted to do business with. The sort of person who tries to prove his intelligence constantly rarely has the ability to cut through the fat to get into the meat of the matter. They'll play in the weeds all day long, but never climb the mountain for a good view.
I agree with Patio11, buck up grow a pair and charge good money. It looks like you've got solid infrastructure, it just needs to be charged for and sold.