I think I vouch for Thomas when I say that you have no idea how many more customers you can get and more importantly how much more money you will be able to make if you drop your picodollars pricing.
I work for various hedge funds in NYC and none of my clients will ever take Tarsnap seriously based on your pricing. They equate pricing with quality.
Not sure what the problem is. Would they use AWS? On EC2 pricing page you see prices like "$0.080 per Hour". On Tarsnap home page you see "$0.30/GB". What's the "quality price" for backup service?
Are these hedge funds not sophisticated enough to understand exponential notation or SI prefixes? (Surely not!) Or is it that they feel the pricing scheme is too 'whimsical' for their ultra-serious line of work?
Maybe as an experiment Colin could spin a new website for the exact same tarsnap service, but renamed and repriced (10x?, 100x?) to suit the suits. I think that would be very interesting.
I think you're conflating two different issues here -- advertising prices in picodollars, and what the price per GB ends up being.
As far as picodollars go, I figured that hedge funds would understand those perfectly -- after all, they're in the business of shaving microseconds off their order times so that they can extract a few extra microdollars per share, right?
I have a tremendous respect for you and I love your product. But you have to understand that hedge funds do not care about 'saving money' as much as they care about 'making money'. So yes, they will go to crazy lengths to shave microseconds off their order times but they will not try to save a penny while they are conducting their business.
From their perspective, when they see a product priced in picodollars their immediate reaction is that this is not a product for them. They want to use best in class product and they have learned over the years that the best in class product costs money, lots of it. So even though Tarsnap is best in class, they will ignore it because it is priced too low. For their back up service, they want to pay thousands of dollars and get a guarantee from the vendor that they will be their if shit hits the fan.
The lesson here is to fork a copy of the tarnsap codebase. Then hire a good designer/marketer to make a corporate-safe image for tarsnap-enterprise. Pictures of people in business attire smiling at spreadsheets and stuff. Price it 100x current- It's _military grade encryption!_
Then retire to somewhere arm and have umbrella drinks.
My target customers are hackers/tech people and the companies they work for.
I've had great success with hackers taking Tarsnap to their employers and saying "hey, we should use this". Picodollars don't cause any problems there; they say "it costs $0.30 / GB" and in the unlikely case that management actually looks at the Tarsnap website, it's just a technical thing and they trust their technical people.
The market I am excluding is corporate management seeing Tarsnap and deciding that they want to use it without understanding anything technical about it. I don't mind losing that market -- in fact, I'm happy to lose it, because I don't have the time necessary to provide hand-holding support to non-technical users.
So are many of your prospective customers! STOP DOING THAT.