Daemonic Dispatches - Latest Comments in Tarsnap and the prepaid billing model

Re: Tarsnap and the prepaid billing model

Kristoffer Rath Hansen — Wed, 07 May 2014 06:57:43 -0000

Ah okay. Would it be something you would consider adding as a feature now that it is feasable?

Re: Tarsnap and the prepaid billing model

cperciva — Wed, 07 May 2014 06:51:18 -0000

Stripe didn't exist when I wrote that, five years ago...

Re: Tarsnap and the prepaid billing model

Kristoffer Rath Hansen — Wed, 07 May 2014 06:48:27 -0000

Actually, the costs of doing that wouldn't be that high given that you could use something like Stripe or Paymill. It would roughly cost the same as you pay with PayPal, but it gives you a unique string for every user who have entered their card, and then you can simply charge their cards with that string.

If that string ever gets in the wrong hands - or the expiry date and last 4 digits of credit card number - then the only thing they can do is to charge their cards to your account. Then you could simply refund it.

Re: Tarsnap and the prepaid billing model

cperciva — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 15:59:55 -0000

Don't worry, you'll get an email warning you when your account gets low, and another email warning you if your account balance falls below zero (at which point you'll have a week to add more money before your account expires).

Automatically charging a credit card as needed is something a few people have asked for, so it's certainly something I'm thinking of supporting in the future -- but the costs associated with that are quite high (e.g., I would need to store credit card data) and the prepaid log-in-and-deposit-money-when-you-get-an-email system seems to be working quite well, so this isn't a high priority.

Re: Tarsnap and the prepaid billing model

Sriram Krishnan — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 15:39:58 -0000

One option I would like to see is to have an automatic addition to funds. When my balance becomes $0, you could increment it by $10 automatically (provided I had authorized you to do so earlier). I just put $10 into my tarsnap account and I'm wondering whether I would need to remember to keep my account funded every few months

Re: Tarsnap and the prepaid billing model

Jimbob — Sun, 17 May 2009 08:11:27 -0000

I love that you consider "the logarithms of [something] follow a normal (aka. Gaussian, aka. "bell curve") distribution" to be for "the non-statisticians" :)

Re: Tarsnap and the prepaid billing model

cperciva — Sat, 02 May 2009 01:17:33 -0000

If Amazon suddenly decides to kill S3, I could migrate to a different host. There would be an outage while the migration took place, and any new host would likely be far less redundant than S3 is right now (one of the main reasons I'm using S3 is that I trust it more than anything I can build in the short term), but the tarsnap service would not die.

If Amazon silently corrupts data on S3, well, there's not much I can do about that. Corruption won't go unnoticed, but it's impossible to guarantee uncorrupted backups if you can't rely on the underlying storage to some extent -- I could replicate everything offsite, but (even leaving the issues of cost out of the picture) if I did that you'd just be asking what I'd do if S3 and my offsite storage simultaneously corrupted data. Everything I've seen of S3 indicates to me that Amazon is quite conservative about making sure that data will not be corrupted, so this isn't a scenario which I'm particularly concerned about.

Re: Tarsnap and the prepaid billing model

Robert — Fri, 01 May 2009 11:47:34 -0000

Been awhile since I've checked in on the tarsnap project. I gotta say I like the concept of service layering to Amazon S3.
My only question, Colin, is what is the mitigated response to such an instance where Amazon cancels the particular service
in use. Or as in another situational case, Amazon corrupts data in this service rendering the backup unusable.

Firstly, I feel that both cases are quite speculative and not foreseeable. But when talking about backing up its always good to have
a backup plan for the backup plan!

So for the first instance (Amazon discontinues service). Would you see it quite conveniently possible to move the service to a set
of private servers or another commercial host without service loss (at least minimally).

The second situation seems even more unlikely. My questions here involve underlying storage practices (do they snapshot their systems
in the case of failures) and the guarantees of backup resiliency under stress. To clarify, what and who ensures that backups are being
protected against fault. I find it incredibly odd that some backup companies often disclaim that you should ensure you have your own
backups so that they aren't at fault if something happens. My only response to that is while it is always correct to have as many backups
in different locations (securely) as your data or paranoia requires, but that the backup service provider's sole purpose of existence is to guarantee
the CIA (confidentiality, integrity, and availability). I guess I'm more or less interested in the interpretation of liability for this kind of service
and not that this situation is very likely.

Thank Colin for your contributed work to FreeBSD and projects like this!

Re: Tarsnap and the prepaid billing model

Jason DiCioccio — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:01:34 -0000

Keep up the great work! I use and love the service..

Re: Tarsnap and the prepaid billing model

Mark MacLeod — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:07:34 -0000

Colin, thanks for sharing my post. I am amazed that you make money with this average revenue per user. And you're absolutely correct about the cost of payment processing. Sounds like your approach is a good one.

Re: Tarsnap and the prepaid billing model

cperciva — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 06:09:21 -0000

I'd probably make a lot more money. :-)

On the downside, I doubt I would have any of my current customers; and the few people using tarsnap wouldn't be anywhere near as enthusiastic about telling their friends about it. As a result, I'd have to spend a lot of time and money on marketing. I don't like marketing -- I'm not good at it, and moreover it would take my time away from working on making tarsnap better.

Re: Tarsnap and the prepaid billing model

ssp — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 02:01:29 -0000

Ever since I heard of tarsnap I have wondered what would happen if you multiplied your prices by 100 (or more) and tried selling it aggressively to enterprise customers.

Re: Tarsnap and the prepaid billing model

cperciva — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 05:34:41 -0000

I've made several people at Amazon very much aware that I'm looking forward to FPS being available in Canada. :-)

Re: Tarsnap and the prepaid billing model

ryan — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 04:46:48 -0000

I am sure Amazon will expand to Canada soon. They just started it, maybe contact them and ask them to be a beta tester for Canada. Also, for the paypal micropayment system, yes you will need two accounts. Just do like they say if the charge is over $12 then use the 2.9% .30 account to charge it, if less than $12 use the microtransaction account. I believe you have to do the same for FPS and DevPay on Amazon. Currently only using DevPay but looking into FPS. Good luck, finding profitable means is usually a little bit of science, hardly ever works with your first shot or with one type of stream.

Re: Tarsnap and the prepaid billing model

cperciva — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 04:09:37 -0000

Unfortunately, Amazon FPS is not available in Canada (where I am) -- otherwise I'd definitely sign up for that. Paypal micropayments might be an option, but it sounds like I would need to have two paypal accounts to do that (one for for standard fee rate and one for the micropayment rate?) -- so I'm not sure if it makes sense to do this; but I'll certainly look into it.

Thanks!

Re: Tarsnap and the prepaid billing model

ryan — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 02:36:32 -0000

One other place you can look is amazon fps, or paypal micropayments. They are there if you look, . 5% and .05 cents typically at the worst rates. so for your lower end users this would still be somewhat profitable. https://www.paypal.com/Inte...