I'm sure you think me crazy, but that's what I was aiming for. I want people to be able to say, like _delirium and wwortiz did, "this is clearly a reasonable price because he's using S3 for backing storage and we know how much S3 costs".
A critical part of trust is transparency, and in the long term I think I'll do better by having transparent and obviously reasonable pricing than by obscuring things and trying to maximize my (short-term) profits.
It doesn't. But people aren't rational -- they'll reject a good deal (including free money!) if they think the person offering the deal is making out better than they are.
I think you guys are just looking at value differently.
I didn't know about either of your companies but by the discussion, its clearly possible for Tarsnap users to derive value from the trust associated with transparency and feeling like their dollar is maximized.
tptacek, pricing schemes aren't the only component of the purchase decision or profitability. His users are making a more emotional decision. cperciva should stick to the core of what his users are finding valuable...then get bought out and turn into an evil profit maximizing company
Seeing how Amazon's whole business model is basically to commoditize storage (and cycles and database queries) and drive prices as low as possible, their price per gigabyte seems like a very dangerous star for Colin to hitch his wagon to.
