I give them one time payment, store a gigabyte of video, and share with millions of people. People keep watching and using up all the network costs and hosting costs. How are these guys going to keep going "permanently"?
Okay, your previous post was pretty unclear, but given this explanation, I'm giving you a rare (for me) downvote. You're speaking way too confidently about things that are definitely more ambiguous than you're letting on. It's important to be right, especially when you're crapping on other people's work.
I've also posted some skepticism about what they're doing, but the difference is that I'm asking questions rather than making assumptions.
I don't think that is the service they are offering. It simply says storage. The only sharing mentioned is sharing with other user's archives.... not public access.
But regardless, we have no idea what backend they are using. Hell, I can go to S3 right now, put a gig out there, and a million hits only cost me pennies. And in theory, that cost will only continue to shrink.
I would like to see more details on this. Bandwidth-limited sharing would still be economically feasible up to a point.
If they have run the numbers and are careful to leave a generous safety margin, I can see this working out. Eventually it will fail, as everything does, but it could last a very long time before that happens.
One more thought: if they are successful, they may accumulate a substantial endowment, at which point the primary risk is capture of that endowment by unethical board members. They have a good board right now, but will that always be the case? Time will tell.
We're making a lot of assumptions about a service that should probably be making things a lot more clear before they start taking money. My assumption is that "sharing" means sharing with family, etc. as opposed to publishing.
Traffic is as close to free as it's going to get. Sure, AWS/GCP/Azure charge a lot as a lock-in strategy, but for example DigitalOcean charges $5/TB, while Hetzner and OVH don't charge for traffic for dedicated servers at all.
They don't mention anything about hosting or streaming your data - just storing it. I assume the backend will be something similar to glacier or just slow, cold storage.
