What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)(kalzumeus.com)
kalzumeus.com
What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/
19 comments
> So that kind of thinking is why every second thing I’d like to hobby-use is priced as a free trial with one missing crucial feature, then $300/mo.
You seem to be under the impression that if people didn't charge so much money, you'd have stuff cheaper. That's not true - what would actually happen is you'd just have less stuff, because people wouldn't build them in the first place.
If someone can afford to create software and run it while charging far less than it's worth for your benefit, then wonderful, but it boggles my mind that you somehow think people owe you this service. Do you also expect people to go into their office and tell their boss "actually, I don't need such a high salary, go ahead and lower it"?
> That’s basically the definition of a discriminating monopolist and what gets you airline-style inscrutable pricing and the SSO tax, isn’t it?
You think it's discrimination to ask people who use more of a service to pay more? You think if an enterprise is using something for business purposes it's not ok to ask them to pay more for something than if a user is using it for hobby purposes?
> If you’ve put it in writing and not planning to sue over violations, you’re lying to me.
That seems both unworkable and kind of ridiculous. You're basically advocating for a "zero context" policy around contracts, in which people don't have any choice whether to sue someone. Even if it's a minor violation that isn't worth it to sue over, or a violation that they decide is ok for them in that context. Why would that be better than the alternative?
You seem to be under the impression that if people didn't charge so much money, you'd have stuff cheaper. That's not true - what would actually happen is you'd just have less stuff, because people wouldn't build them in the first place.
If someone can afford to create software and run it while charging far less than it's worth for your benefit, then wonderful, but it boggles my mind that you somehow think people owe you this service. Do you also expect people to go into their office and tell their boss "actually, I don't need such a high salary, go ahead and lower it"?
> That’s basically the definition of a discriminating monopolist and what gets you airline-style inscrutable pricing and the SSO tax, isn’t it?
You think it's discrimination to ask people who use more of a service to pay more? You think if an enterprise is using something for business purposes it's not ok to ask them to pay more for something than if a user is using it for hobby purposes?
> If you’ve put it in writing and not planning to sue over violations, you’re lying to me.
That seems both unworkable and kind of ridiculous. You're basically advocating for a "zero context" policy around contracts, in which people don't have any choice whether to sue someone. Even if it's a minor violation that isn't worth it to sue over, or a violation that they decide is ok for them in that context. Why would that be better than the alternative?
>You think it's discrimination to ask people who use more of a service to pay more?
The point is "enterprise" plans are generally much more expensive relative to the use of the service or the extra feature (the most common extra features like SSO and auditing are generally cheap to provide, both in terms of resource usage and cost to implement and support). So while they may use the service more they wind up paying proportionally much more for it (the assumption being that theu are getting much more value from the core features). This is price discrimination, whether monopolistic or not (which is absolutely rife in B2B products). I'm not going to comment on the morality of it, but it can be very frustrating if you don't fit into the buckets the pricing structure assumes (the other thing that is common in B2B that pisses me off is "call us for a quote". Generally a lot of tools seem to have an overinflated sense of how much value they are providing me, but I am a little unusual in that I use a lot of different tools but not heavily, being a generalist in a small startup)
The point is "enterprise" plans are generally much more expensive relative to the use of the service or the extra feature (the most common extra features like SSO and auditing are generally cheap to provide, both in terms of resource usage and cost to implement and support). So while they may use the service more they wind up paying proportionally much more for it (the assumption being that theu are getting much more value from the core features). This is price discrimination, whether monopolistic or not (which is absolutely rife in B2B products). I'm not going to comment on the morality of it, but it can be very frustrating if you don't fit into the buckets the pricing structure assumes (the other thing that is common in B2B that pisses me off is "call us for a quote". Generally a lot of tools seem to have an overinflated sense of how much value they are providing me, but I am a little unusual in that I use a lot of different tools but not heavily, being a generalist in a small startup)
This is why AWS took over the world. It’s the opposite: WYSIWYG vis a vis pricing. I’m not sure why so few other developer oriented SaaS services follow their lead.
It is convenient but AWS does employ another common tactic: the easily accessible prices are the highest ones. If you're a customer of any significant size you are being screwed if you are not negotiating a discount (IMO cloud is extremely expensive anyway, so if you have very high duty cycle usage you would be better off using something other than cloud).
>> That’s basically the definition of a discriminating monopolist and what gets you airline-style inscrutable pricing and the SSO tax, isn’t it?
> You think it's discrimination to ask people who use more of a service to pay more?
Terminology confusion. In microeconomics, a “discriminating monopolist” is one who engages in “price discrimination”, that is to say providing the same service to everybody but charging each customer as much as they are willing to pay for it. This has nothing to do with the social justice usage of “discrimination” (except in the broadest sense of discriminating one kind of thing from another and acting on the result).
> You think if an enterprise is using something for business purposes it's not ok to ask them to pay more for something than if a user is using it for hobby purposes?
Insofar as they receive the same service (no or the same SLA, etc), or even insofar as the markup for the latter case is disproportionate to the actual costs, I think it is bullshit to do it. How much bullshit is acceptable, both in life and in selling technical services, is to be decided (certainly a nonzero amount), but at the very least I think it should cost the service provider some measure of trust and thus create a preference towards providers that don’t do it.
In the case described, all of this is not that huge; my strong reaction was mainly to TFA going from “fair” pricing to price discrimination.
>> If you’ve put it in writing and not planning to sue over violations, you’re lying to me.
> You're basically advocating for a "zero context" policy around contracts, in which people don't have any choice whether to sue someone.
I put it in absolute terms myself, so I guess I deserve this a bit, but still, no, that’s not what I was trying to advocate. Note that the original article was talking about putting in a clause the service provider would not make the slightest effort to enforce or would even be completely unable to.
Consider the law example I also gave: it’s one thing to allow for some discretion from a prosecutor; it’s another for people to know that nobody was ever convicted of a crime that’s technically on the books. I understand this is a slippery slope argument and those are always suspect, but I think it’s fair to say that this kind of neglect for one piece of law does tend to spread to other parts of it, at least when people are doing it consciously and not because they’re unaware of legal arcana.
In contracts, the situation is somewhat better because the punishment is not that dire. It is also worse because usually the only explicit penalty is termination of service, so in essence you have a bunch of rules which are all nominally enforced the same way except the provider will enforce some of them and won’t enforce others, at its discretion. (Naturally, I also think that the very common arbitrary no-recourse termination clause is completely asininine. At the very least, I never feel safe to rely on a service that uses one.)
> You seem to be under the impression that if people didn't charge so much money, you'd have stuff cheaper. That's not true - what would actually happen is you'd just have less stuff, because people wouldn't build them in the first place.
You are to some extent right, of course. To some extent, though, some of my experiences with price discrimination (see above) tell me you’re also kind of wrong.
For example, I can’t recall an airline or railway that on transitioning from all refundable tickets to a split of non-refundable and refundable tickets ended up making non-refundable tickets measurably cheaper (in the long run) or pricing refundable ones in a way that’d correspond to any realistic fraction of refunds. Similarly, increasing limits on luggage never seem to make things any cheaper. That looks like price discrimination, not adjusting for costs or anything related to actual costs.
The SSO thing, as another example, looks the same to me, and even actual service operators in this forum have said that it actually is. Granted, I’ve heard horror stories about the integration and support costs, but if even a couple of operators settled on a single very strictly defined subset of SAML, OAuth or whatnot, saying it’s their way or the highway, the implementations and the integration consultants would likely come. It’s just that nobody has the incentive to, and systems remain insecure as a result.
> If someone can afford to create software and run it while charging far less than it's worth for your benefit, then wonderful, but it boggles my mind that you somehow think people owe you this service.
First off, TFA was advocating for eliminating (and settling for deemphasising) a class of service that was at the time manifestly cost-effective to operate (though could become less so after scaling up).
Second, to a degree, yeah, I’d actually be happier with a service that provides no free or severly subsidized options at all than with one that has a free option, then a huge cliff, then a heavy-profit-earner option.
If this means a world where there are no accessible services of that kind, sure, because except for very costly services such a world is unstable: at some point somebody will build an accessible alternative, as long as they are not pushed out by a subsidized free option. This applies to tech-oriented services first of all, although when the expertise gap between wanting and building is larger such situations do sometimes persist (CAD, CAT/TM, arguably photo editors).
> You think it's discrimination to ask people who use more of a service to pay more?
Terminology confusion. In microeconomics, a “discriminating monopolist” is one who engages in “price discrimination”, that is to say providing the same service to everybody but charging each customer as much as they are willing to pay for it. This has nothing to do with the social justice usage of “discrimination” (except in the broadest sense of discriminating one kind of thing from another and acting on the result).
> You think if an enterprise is using something for business purposes it's not ok to ask them to pay more for something than if a user is using it for hobby purposes?
Insofar as they receive the same service (no or the same SLA, etc), or even insofar as the markup for the latter case is disproportionate to the actual costs, I think it is bullshit to do it. How much bullshit is acceptable, both in life and in selling technical services, is to be decided (certainly a nonzero amount), but at the very least I think it should cost the service provider some measure of trust and thus create a preference towards providers that don’t do it.
In the case described, all of this is not that huge; my strong reaction was mainly to TFA going from “fair” pricing to price discrimination.
>> If you’ve put it in writing and not planning to sue over violations, you’re lying to me.
> You're basically advocating for a "zero context" policy around contracts, in which people don't have any choice whether to sue someone.
I put it in absolute terms myself, so I guess I deserve this a bit, but still, no, that’s not what I was trying to advocate. Note that the original article was talking about putting in a clause the service provider would not make the slightest effort to enforce or would even be completely unable to.
Consider the law example I also gave: it’s one thing to allow for some discretion from a prosecutor; it’s another for people to know that nobody was ever convicted of a crime that’s technically on the books. I understand this is a slippery slope argument and those are always suspect, but I think it’s fair to say that this kind of neglect for one piece of law does tend to spread to other parts of it, at least when people are doing it consciously and not because they’re unaware of legal arcana.
In contracts, the situation is somewhat better because the punishment is not that dire. It is also worse because usually the only explicit penalty is termination of service, so in essence you have a bunch of rules which are all nominally enforced the same way except the provider will enforce some of them and won’t enforce others, at its discretion. (Naturally, I also think that the very common arbitrary no-recourse termination clause is completely asininine. At the very least, I never feel safe to rely on a service that uses one.)
> You seem to be under the impression that if people didn't charge so much money, you'd have stuff cheaper. That's not true - what would actually happen is you'd just have less stuff, because people wouldn't build them in the first place.
You are to some extent right, of course. To some extent, though, some of my experiences with price discrimination (see above) tell me you’re also kind of wrong.
For example, I can’t recall an airline or railway that on transitioning from all refundable tickets to a split of non-refundable and refundable tickets ended up making non-refundable tickets measurably cheaper (in the long run) or pricing refundable ones in a way that’d correspond to any realistic fraction of refunds. Similarly, increasing limits on luggage never seem to make things any cheaper. That looks like price discrimination, not adjusting for costs or anything related to actual costs.
The SSO thing, as another example, looks the same to me, and even actual service operators in this forum have said that it actually is. Granted, I’ve heard horror stories about the integration and support costs, but if even a couple of operators settled on a single very strictly defined subset of SAML, OAuth or whatnot, saying it’s their way or the highway, the implementations and the integration consultants would likely come. It’s just that nobody has the incentive to, and systems remain insecure as a result.
> If someone can afford to create software and run it while charging far less than it's worth for your benefit, then wonderful, but it boggles my mind that you somehow think people owe you this service.
First off, TFA was advocating for eliminating (and settling for deemphasising) a class of service that was at the time manifestly cost-effective to operate (though could become less so after scaling up).
Second, to a degree, yeah, I’d actually be happier with a service that provides no free or severly subsidized options at all than with one that has a free option, then a huge cliff, then a heavy-profit-earner option.
If this means a world where there are no accessible services of that kind, sure, because except for very costly services such a world is unstable: at some point somebody will build an accessible alternative, as long as they are not pushed out by a subsidized free option. This applies to tech-oriented services first of all, although when the expertise gap between wanting and building is larger such situations do sometimes persist (CAD, CAT/TM, arguably photo editors).
> an airline or railway that on transitioning from all refundable tickets to a split of non-refundable and refundable tickets ended up making non-refundable tickets measurably cheaper (in the long run)
I don’t know how long is the long run for you, but Delta is right now offering RT to Vegas for $444 non-refundable and $638 refundable. I didn’t go check all the other carriers, but I definitely recall tickets with more flexibility (sometimes including refundable, other times creditable) being sold at higher prices than less flexible tickets.
As a buyer that makes sense to me; it costs money to provide flexibility; it’s worth it to some buyers but not all, so buyers can opt into the level of flexibility that matches their preferences.
I don’t know how long is the long run for you, but Delta is right now offering RT to Vegas for $444 non-refundable and $638 refundable. I didn’t go check all the other carriers, but I definitely recall tickets with more flexibility (sometimes including refundable, other times creditable) being sold at higher prices than less flexible tickets.
As a buyer that makes sense to me; it costs money to provide flexibility; it’s worth it to some buyers but not all, so buyers can opt into the level of flexibility that matches their preferences.
Not what I was talking about.
Some airlines in my memory went from only having refundable tickets to having both types, and for some reason the price of the nonrefundable ones after the change ends up being about the same as the price of the (refundable) ones before that.
Also, well, I don’t know what Delta does—for some airlines, the advertising term “flexible” means some sort of option to change your flight as well as one to refund the ticket, being a tier above “refundable”—but if the buyer requesting a refund is the only possible cost, we should have roughly $444 = $638 / [1 - P(refund)], whereby P(refund) = 30%, and that feels ridiculously high. Not implausibly high (I’m used to a difference of 2x or more), but high enough that I’m dubious.
Some airlines in my memory went from only having refundable tickets to having both types, and for some reason the price of the nonrefundable ones after the change ends up being about the same as the price of the (refundable) ones before that.
Also, well, I don’t know what Delta does—for some airlines, the advertising term “flexible” means some sort of option to change your flight as well as one to refund the ticket, being a tier above “refundable”—but if the buyer requesting a refund is the only possible cost, we should have roughly $444 = $638 / [1 - P(refund)], whereby P(refund) = 30%, and that feels ridiculously high. Not implausibly high (I’m used to a difference of 2x or more), but high enough that I’m dubious.
> for some reason the price of the nonrefundable ones after the change ends up being about the same as the price of the (refundable) ones before that.
Was this over a long enough period where inflation reduced the value of the nominal currency and where jet fuel prices and costs of financing their fleet could have risen significantly?
Was this over a long enough period where inflation reduced the value of the nominal currency and where jet fuel prices and costs of financing their fleet could have risen significantly?
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As someone who flies a lot on his own dime, inscrutable airline pricing ends up being good.
It means I can always get a seat, I just have to pay more. It means businesses subsidize mine and everyone else’s flights.
When I’m travelling the world and have to use a train system with fixed prices, I don’t like that I have to book many days in advance or else the tickets are sold out. Just raise the price! Let the rich pay double so it’s cheaper for everyone else, and anyone who _really needs_ to use the service can weigh the costs and decide to pay more.
It means I can always get a seat, I just have to pay more. It means businesses subsidize mine and everyone else’s flights.
When I’m travelling the world and have to use a train system with fixed prices, I don’t like that I have to book many days in advance or else the tickets are sold out. Just raise the price! Let the rich pay double so it’s cheaper for everyone else, and anyone who _really needs_ to use the service can weigh the costs and decide to pay more.
You mean everyone who really needs the service will never get it because the rich will always pay more?
Must be nice to always have the money to pay more to get service immediately, but I don't think that's something we should strive for.
Must be nice to always have the money to pay more to get service immediately, but I don't think that's something we should strive for.
Every saas does this, really. You want sso or an audit trail? 10x costs! Doesn't matter that they didn't need to add code and that it's even less for the vendor to manage, you have self selected as an Enterprise, pay Enterprise pricing.
So go through life hating people who do this and being poor because you don’t.
This is basically a masterpiece in missing the point of Tarsnap IMO.
IMO Tarsnap is about being the perfect lifestyle business for an extremely technical engineer, it's something I aspire to build one day also. Billing? Just the most simple model possible. Sales? Nah. Marketing? Nah. Fancy website even? Nah.
Just customers that know what they are buying, are happy to pay for it and software that is exemplary.
IMO Tarsnap is about being the perfect lifestyle business for an extremely technical engineer, it's something I aspire to build one day also. Billing? Just the most simple model possible. Sales? Nah. Marketing? Nah. Fancy website even? Nah.
Just customers that know what they are buying, are happy to pay for it and software that is exemplary.
I nodded along when I first read this, but ten years later I have two, more complex, reactions.
Reaction #1: Whoa, that's a lot of assumption that serious professionals operate within incorporated businesses, anybody else is frivolous.
Here's an alternative framing. Incorporated businesses don't prevent catastrophe, they just make sure there's nobody to blame when things go catastrophically wrong (e.g. https://prospect.org/health/2023-07-29-shock-treatment-emerg...). They also go off on strategic misadventures, destabilizing the product for existing customers while chasing more lucrative ones.
A caricature, yes. But a more accurate caricature I think than the one in OP.
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Reaction #2: the Opticon page he glowingly links to no longer works. They probably switched hosting providers at some point, and that didn't affect their ability to do business even if it caused them to forget some of their past.
Backups as "ability to continue to operate in the present" are a very different thing from backups as "providing the future access to the past." It's absolutely true that any company will see more profit in the former over the latter. That seems like a weakness of capitalism more than one of Tarsnap.
Reaction #1: Whoa, that's a lot of assumption that serious professionals operate within incorporated businesses, anybody else is frivolous.
Here's an alternative framing. Incorporated businesses don't prevent catastrophe, they just make sure there's nobody to blame when things go catastrophically wrong (e.g. https://prospect.org/health/2023-07-29-shock-treatment-emerg...). They also go off on strategic misadventures, destabilizing the product for existing customers while chasing more lucrative ones.
A caricature, yes. But a more accurate caricature I think than the one in OP.
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Reaction #2: the Opticon page he glowingly links to no longer works. They probably switched hosting providers at some point, and that didn't affect their ability to do business even if it caused them to forget some of their past.
Backups as "ability to continue to operate in the present" are a very different thing from backups as "providing the future access to the past." It's absolutely true that any company will see more profit in the former over the latter. That seems like a weakness of capitalism more than one of Tarsnap.
Tarsnap is not an ideal business model for me because that company and their service can fail to exist tomorrow. Get your own backup software and storage provider. Store your encrypted blobs wherever you want.
Basically make it attractive for acquisition by some large shitty company who will shut it down.
Indeed. Acquisitions are often great for the founders, sometimes ok for shareholders, and usually a disaster for employees and customers.
(2014)
And it is still expensive today
Note that this blog post says it’s too cheap (see “ill-considered price decrease” and the post behind the link).
I pay ~6€ for 1TB of storage on Hetzner managed Nextcloud instance, that is 0,005859375€ per GB. Obviously, that is not a back up solution or a back up solution for the "PARANOID tm", but come on, 0.25$ per GB is a ripoff
At that pricing, if you need to backup less than 25GB compressed data, Hetzner is more expensive than the "ripoff".
Good thinking there pal, but you are missing the point. If I wanted to store 25GB i could probably find a spot that'd do it for free (Mega, Google Drive etc)
If you need free space to store something this is so not for you buddy... Just go register 10 google accounts to spread your stuff around and you never need to pay for storage;) some people like to be a customer not a product
my point it is overpriced no matter how you look at it
Yes, it's seriously overpriced and storage costs hasn't decreased on Tarsnap for ages. That is the reason I am currently migrating off Tarsnap after using it for over ten years.
No, it's overpriced if you compare it to worse solutions which is how the market is supposed to work
So I should pay 125€/mo(plus transfer fees) instead of 6€/mo for my 500GB?
No. I already said it's probably not for you. If you need lowest price per GB and don't care about anything else including your time or customer support then nothing beats a bunch of google accs with free drive tier. No price is better than zero
But for me tarsnap is convenient as extra offsite backup for valuable stuff. Price per GB is not the only factor and different people have different priorities.
But for me tarsnap is convenient as extra offsite backup for valuable stuff. Price per GB is not the only factor and different people have different priorities.
It's interesting to note that Colin - who apparently explicitly asked for this feedback from a close friend who happens to be an eminent domain expert - appears to have taken basically none of Patrick's advice in a decade.
I don't know the inside baseball, but if I was @patio11, I'd be more than annoyed by this. I might ratchet up to lightly insulted, given how master-of-the-obvious some of the advice is.
I don't know the inside baseball, but if I was @patio11, I'd be more than annoyed by this. I might ratchet up to lightly insulted, given how master-of-the-obvious some of the advice is.
Advice is worth what you paid for it and even if you solicit advice you are not required to take it, especially if taking that advice implies you have to do stuff that runs counter to your nature and views.
Patrick's advice is very good: for Patrick. But for Colin it was more of an exercise in how you could run Tarsnap, not how he should run Tarsnap. Meanwhile, Tarsnap is still in business many years later, has happy customers and as far as I know happy people running it.
Patrick's advice is very good: for Patrick. But for Colin it was more of an exercise in how you could run Tarsnap, not how he should run Tarsnap. Meanwhile, Tarsnap is still in business many years later, has happy customers and as far as I know happy people running it.
All fair points, and Patrick acknowledged this at the time - and in the previous HN thread back in 2014. I remember it was a good one.
The detail that really pets me backwards is the whole "if you're here, you already know what this is for and how to use it" vibe. It's not just Tarsnap; many aspects of the OSS world uphold this most unfortunate tradition. I believe with all of my heart that it is unnecessarily hostile and antisocial.
Many of the founders and teams I've mentored over the years have experienced me spending a large amount of time and effort explaining the importance of clearly stating why a thing exists and why you should use it; how it works and how it will not create additional unknown risks; what tools it is intended to replace... as the barest civil minimum.
This is just my opinion, but it's a hill I'd die on if necessary.
The detail that really pets me backwards is the whole "if you're here, you already know what this is for and how to use it" vibe. It's not just Tarsnap; many aspects of the OSS world uphold this most unfortunate tradition. I believe with all of my heart that it is unnecessarily hostile and antisocial.
Many of the founders and teams I've mentored over the years have experienced me spending a large amount of time and effort explaining the importance of clearly stating why a thing exists and why you should use it; how it works and how it will not create additional unknown risks; what tools it is intended to replace... as the barest civil minimum.
This is just my opinion, but it's a hill I'd die on if necessary.
It matters to you because you care about seeing things succeed according to your definition of success but consider that there are different kinds of people some of which are more than happy to present their works in such a way that it doesn't turn into a runaway marketing machine but presents itself more like you would look at a utility. I have a project like that myself in the works and if it ever starts to take on a life of its own beyond where I'm having fun with it and it is just useful to others I will have to make a very hard choice: transform it into an actual business or to hobble it in such a way that it won't take off (or possibly even to shut it down). Which of those two it will be I can't tell you but in the meantime I've done what I could do to ensure that no matter what I choose users of the service will have perfect data portability with a local installation.
Founders that are in the funding cycle would obviously benefit from Patrick's advice they are going to increase their chances at commercial success that way. But if commercial success isn't your #1 goal there are other viable paths based on your priorities in life. And that's a hill that I'd die on if necessary because I don't believe that everything has to be run as a marketing driven profit maximization engine. The OSS world upholds that tradition pretty good and I'm fully supportive of it, there are many paths to a happy life and not all of them run through a wallet.
Founders that are in the funding cycle would obviously benefit from Patrick's advice they are going to increase their chances at commercial success that way. But if commercial success isn't your #1 goal there are other viable paths based on your priorities in life. And that's a hill that I'd die on if necessary because I don't believe that everything has to be run as a marketing driven profit maximization engine. The OSS world upholds that tradition pretty good and I'm fully supportive of it, there are many paths to a happy life and not all of them run through a wallet.
I agree, understand and appreciate.
I want to clarify, though, that in talking about the unfortunate number of OSS projects which convey the "if you're here, you need no explanation", I am absolutely not hung up on profit motives.
Instead, I am talking about the times where you are searching for a technical solution with only a vague intuition about the shape of an approach and some faith that it might exist. And you land on a project homepage that contains so little context that the only reasonable reaction is to have serious doubts that you're in the right place.
You're right, I do care. I have spent a huge amount of my life publishing OSS under different licenses and I want people to experience maximum benefit from that effort. It boggles my mind that people work so hard to build useful tools and then appear to actively gaslight potential users into feeling inadequate instead of attempting even the most basic onboarding advice.
Folks are not obligated to make their code or projects accessible, but if you can't justify even a simple "this is why this exists" statement somewhere prominent that conveys intent without inference or telepathy, I believe that they give up their right to grumble that nothing they do matters and nobody cares.
I want to clarify, though, that in talking about the unfortunate number of OSS projects which convey the "if you're here, you need no explanation", I am absolutely not hung up on profit motives.
Instead, I am talking about the times where you are searching for a technical solution with only a vague intuition about the shape of an approach and some faith that it might exist. And you land on a project homepage that contains so little context that the only reasonable reaction is to have serious doubts that you're in the right place.
You're right, I do care. I have spent a huge amount of my life publishing OSS under different licenses and I want people to experience maximum benefit from that effort. It boggles my mind that people work so hard to build useful tools and then appear to actively gaslight potential users into feeling inadequate instead of attempting even the most basic onboarding advice.
Folks are not obligated to make their code or projects accessible, but if you can't justify even a simple "this is why this exists" statement somewhere prominent that conveys intent without inference or telepathy, I believe that they give up their right to grumble that nothing they do matters and nobody cares.
Well, there is an old English proverb that applies here: you don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Obviously OSS writers could in many cases do better at communications. But communicating clearly is a skill that is unfortunately not all that common and there is an interesting thing about the very best programmers that I know: they all seem to excel at dialogue with the machine but only a small fraction of them is equally skilled at dialogue with humans, present or in writing. This creates an obvious and immediate problem: without infrastructure those people are still going to be able to create useful software, various tools and so on, but those tools are going to be bereft of documentation and explanation. This is the case for a large chunk of all open source projects and if you look a bit more closely at this you'll probably find that the most successful open source projects are successful primarily because their creators either had great communications skills (possibly even better than they had software skills) or that they found someone to contribute that skill early on in the project.
So what you are seeing is entirely the expected outcome!
So what you are seeing is entirely the expected outcome!
> I believe with all of my heart that it is unnecessarily hostile and antisocial.
I used to believe this. And maybe at some point it was, but then the world, and the sector, was absolutely _flooded_ with script kiddies.
Now things that immediately confuse people that don't at least have a halfway decent idea of what they're about satisfy me.
I used to believe this. And maybe at some point it was, but then the world, and the sector, was absolutely _flooded_ with script kiddies.
Now things that immediately confuse people that don't at least have a halfway decent idea of what they're about satisfy me.
Why would he be annoyed? The lifetime business value and goodwill from this public analysis probably earned a lot more for Patrick than any consulting gig Colin would have paid for.
Patio11 is a professional advice giver, while cperciva makes a living running a niche service. The ability to give eloquent and persuasive advice is professionally valuable to the giver, but should not be mistaken for domain expertise. It's important when running a business to lash yourself to the mast sometimes and not listen to people without direct experience or skin in the game.
That was a good description of Patrick at the time he wrote this post, but stopped being accurate shortly afterwards. The majority of his career, in fact, has not been consulting or advice-giving; he made his living on a micro-SAAS, like you, for a bunch of years, and left consulting after an ill-fated startup he did with some schmuck on HN and spent the longest stretch of his career to date working in the payment industry mines at Stripe.
Your point is well taken! I appreciate also that you're not making an absolute declaration that advice is untrustworthy. I spent a long time as a professional advice-giver too, but if you lashed yourself to the mast and ignored my advice that there was a CBC padding oracle in your session cookie implementation, you were plotting a course to the ocean floor. Running a business means being careful which advice you let in and which you don't.
My only nit here is: between this and your other comment on the thread, I don't think Patrick's advice here was unwelcome. I have a vague recollection of Colin being asked first. Also: if anyone was going to ask before publishing unsolicited advice about someone else's business, it would be Patrick. So the Bingo Card thing is a bit of a low blow. Also, easy to make fun of when you exclude the context that he lived off that Bingo thingy for years.
Your point is well taken! I appreciate also that you're not making an absolute declaration that advice is untrustworthy. I spent a long time as a professional advice-giver too, but if you lashed yourself to the mast and ignored my advice that there was a CBC padding oracle in your session cookie implementation, you were plotting a course to the ocean floor. Running a business means being careful which advice you let in and which you don't.
My only nit here is: between this and your other comment on the thread, I don't think Patrick's advice here was unwelcome. I have a vague recollection of Colin being asked first. Also: if anyone was going to ask before publishing unsolicited advice about someone else's business, it would be Patrick. So the Bingo Card thing is a bit of a low blow. Also, easy to make fun of when you exclude the context that he lived off that Bingo thingy for years.
I respect Patrick for living off his Bingo card thingy! If I fault him for anything it's giving up that life; may we all find a Bingo card thingy to sustain us.
Unlike you I don't know either person in this discussion personally and you should construe my comment strictly as beating my favorite dead horse, "be wary of smart-sounding advice from people whose livelihood is built on sounding convincing to people like yourself."
Unlike you I don't know either person in this discussion personally and you should construe my comment strictly as beating my favorite dead horse, "be wary of smart-sounding advice from people whose livelihood is built on sounding convincing to people like yourself."
Absolutely. I get that you're coming from a good and useful place here! It's special pleading for me to say "HN is awash in dubious business advice but you should take Patrick's advice more seriously than most, while remembering that it's just outsider-looking-in advice". But that's my take!
Mostly I was just moved to comment because I got the vibe that Patrick was coming across to you as condescending, and I know he was working hard not to come across that way.
Mostly I was just moved to comment because I got the vibe that Patrick was coming across to you as condescending, and I know he was working hard not to come across that way.
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I applaud Colin's (Tarsnap Founder) attitude. Sure it could be priced better. Sure it could make much, much more than it currently does. But I dislike the notion that every software company needs to optimize for the same things. Tarsnap is a service that I am sure makes comfortable amount of money for its founder and has remained faithful to its initial audience. Why does anything other than that matters? Yes, some things Patrick points out are indeed low-hanging fruits, but I believe it's a conscious decision to completely ignore all the "optimisation" aspects.
Tarsnap doesn't even have any tracker on its homepage. Tarsnap has had the same basic pricing structure for the past ten years. It does one thing and does it well. I hate the pursuit of growth and everything that comes as a result: bloat, shiny landing pages, a/b testing, conversation rate optimisation.
Reminds me of the adage of a Mexican fisherman.
> “Afterwards? Well my friend, that’s when it gets really interesting,” answered the tourist, laughing. “When your business gets really big, you can start buying and selling stocks and make millions!”
> “Millions? Really? And after that?” asked the fishermen.
> “After that you’ll be able to retire, live in a tiny village near the coast, sleep late, play with your children, catch a few fish, take a siesta with your wife and spend your evenings drinking and enjoying your friends.”
> “With all due respect sir, but that’s exactly what we are doing now. So what’s the point wasting twenty-five years?” asked the Mexicans.
Tarsnap doesn't even have any tracker on its homepage. Tarsnap has had the same basic pricing structure for the past ten years. It does one thing and does it well. I hate the pursuit of growth and everything that comes as a result: bloat, shiny landing pages, a/b testing, conversation rate optimisation.
Reminds me of the adage of a Mexican fisherman.
> “Afterwards? Well my friend, that’s when it gets really interesting,” answered the tourist, laughing. “When your business gets really big, you can start buying and selling stocks and make millions!”
> “Millions? Really? And after that?” asked the fishermen.
> “After that you’ll be able to retire, live in a tiny village near the coast, sleep late, play with your children, catch a few fish, take a siesta with your wife and spend your evenings drinking and enjoying your friends.”
> “With all due respect sir, but that’s exactly what we are doing now. So what’s the point wasting twenty-five years?” asked the Mexicans.
> It does one thing and does it well
From the posts I've read recently it seems like it does one thing and it does it by renting a single EC2 server that will bring the service down if it needs to reboot, and it does it by reselling S3 at 10x the cost.
It's funny because maybe it's a good service but going by HN, it's not reliable or cost effective.
From the posts I've read recently it seems like it does one thing and it does it by renting a single EC2 server that will bring the service down if it needs to reboot, and it does it by reselling S3 at 10x the cost.
It's funny because maybe it's a good service but going by HN, it's not reliable or cost effective.
> but going by HN, it's not reliable
That's a cheap shot, it's been as reliable as the underlying fabric, the only thing that really stood out for me is how utterly weird HN is when it comes to determining what constitutes reliability: no data was lost other than a tiny bit that was in inbound transit which can still be recovered (and which you could not realistically protect against). Note that this is a backup service and not something that is normally found in your primary business processes. As such if it stores the crown jewels safely, allows for them to be restored if and when needed and doesn't leak them in the meantime that's mission accomplished.
> or cost effective.
That depends on your use case, and not everything is about cost. The way it is set up I think the trust factor that even Colin can't read your data and that there will always be a way to get your data back out if you should need it is what matters. Backups that don't work are a net negative, a backup that does work can be, given the right circumstances, absolutely priceless.
That's a cheap shot, it's been as reliable as the underlying fabric, the only thing that really stood out for me is how utterly weird HN is when it comes to determining what constitutes reliability: no data was lost other than a tiny bit that was in inbound transit which can still be recovered (and which you could not realistically protect against). Note that this is a backup service and not something that is normally found in your primary business processes. As such if it stores the crown jewels safely, allows for them to be restored if and when needed and doesn't leak them in the meantime that's mission accomplished.
> or cost effective.
That depends on your use case, and not everything is about cost. The way it is set up I think the trust factor that even Colin can't read your data and that there will always be a way to get your data back out if you should need it is what matters. Backups that don't work are a net negative, a backup that does work can be, given the right circumstances, absolutely priceless.
Reliability is important for a backup service. If your machine explodes and you need to restore from backups, but the backup service is down, you need to wait and may lose money due to the outage (SLA, unhappy customers, no ability to onboard new customers etc.). If you’re doing weekly backups, but the backup service was down during the backup slot, and your crontab setup doesn’t yell at you and doesn’t retry until it succeeds, you might lose two weeks’ worth of data if disaster strikes.
Yes, reliability is important. And by that measure Tarsnap is 100% reliable. But not 100% available, and that's something that often gets confused. Having to wait while you are trying to restore a backup would be extremely annoying but that implies that you've done something wrong in your planning: if you expect your backup service to be 100% available then you are probably not engineering things right because for many reasons that might not be the case. Tarsnap does not promise 100% availability, and no other backup service that I'm aware of does. For instance, backblaze offers 11 (!) nines reliability but only 3 nines availability (which is pretty much expected).
If you want more than 3 nines availability neither Backblaze nor Tarsnap nor any other outside service would be able to serve your needs.
If you want more than 3 nines availability neither Backblaze nor Tarsnap nor any other outside service would be able to serve your needs.
I think it's very hard to run a service by yourself of this magnitude reliably, but I'd always take a 99.9% availability daily backup service that runs right at SLO over one that's down for a day once in a blue moon.
Also, parent is talking about ingestion. If your backups aren't configured well and the backup process fails, then your backup may not end up durable.
I also don't think your definition of reliable is generally recognized, which I'd generally call durability. I wouldn't say the scenario above is a durability failure, but an example of the consequences of poor availability.
Also, parent is talking about ingestion. If your backups aren't configured well and the backup process fails, then your backup may not end up durable.
I also don't think your definition of reliable is generally recognized, which I'd generally call durability. I wouldn't say the scenario above is a durability failure, but an example of the consequences of poor availability.
> I think it's very hard to run a service by yourself of this magnitude reliably, but I'd always take a 99.9% availability daily backup service that runs right at SLO over one that's down for a day once in a blue moon.
That's a fallacy right there. Your assumption should be that any service you rely on will be down once in a blue moon, and possibly for a day or even longer.
> Also, parent is talking about ingestion. If your backups aren't configured well and the backup process fails, then your backup may not end up durable.
Yes, indeed, you need to do your work and you don't get to point at others for not doing it right.
> I also don't think your definition of reliable is generally recognized, which I'd generally call durability.
Reliability, durability and availability are all industry terms and have very clear definitions. These are not the same definitions that you would use in ordinary conversation with laypeople but when we're talking shop those are definitely allowed.
> I wouldn't say the scenario above is a durability failure, but an example of the consequences of poor availability.
No, it is a consequence of poor engineering on the part of the user of the service, and is a completely different issue. You engineer your service to ensure that your assumptions hold true and if you fail at doing that your service will fail. When is then only a matter of time and combination of circumstances, but fail it will.
That's a fallacy right there. Your assumption should be that any service you rely on will be down once in a blue moon, and possibly for a day or even longer.
> Also, parent is talking about ingestion. If your backups aren't configured well and the backup process fails, then your backup may not end up durable.
Yes, indeed, you need to do your work and you don't get to point at others for not doing it right.
> I also don't think your definition of reliable is generally recognized, which I'd generally call durability.
Reliability, durability and availability are all industry terms and have very clear definitions. These are not the same definitions that you would use in ordinary conversation with laypeople but when we're talking shop those are definitely allowed.
> I wouldn't say the scenario above is a durability failure, but an example of the consequences of poor availability.
No, it is a consequence of poor engineering on the part of the user of the service, and is a completely different issue. You engineer your service to ensure that your assumptions hold true and if you fail at doing that your service will fail. When is then only a matter of time and combination of circumstances, but fail it will.
Tarsnap doesn’t help you with using the service well, if you need to implement your own retries, and if the docs tell you to just write a single-line shell script and call it from crontab [0].
[0] https://www.tarsnap.com/simple-usage.html
[0] https://www.tarsnap.com/simple-usage.html
> No, it is a consequence of poor engineering on the part of the user of the service,
The entire service going down for 24 hours due to a reboot is not a consequence of poor engineering on the part of the user. A production service which people rely on for critical data failing on the _textbook_ example of running a live service is poor engineering on the services part.
The entire service going down for 24 hours due to a reboot is not a consequence of poor engineering on the part of the user. A production service which people rely on for critical data failing on the _textbook_ example of running a live service is poor engineering on the services part.
I've seen entire datacenters and many services go offline due to 'minor mishaps' and that was stuff done by the largest companies on the planet. If you don't account for failure of underlying infra + services you are not doing it right.
Tarsnap makes very particular guarantees, if you look into that then you'll realize that for some applications it is very useful and for other applications it is not, or that you may have to use not one but multiple backup services to be able to serve all your needs. This can be costly.
Tarsnap makes very particular guarantees, if you look into that then you'll realize that for some applications it is very useful and for other applications it is not, or that you may have to use not one but multiple backup services to be able to serve all your needs. This can be costly.
That's a funny definition of "reliable". I'd factor availability into reliability. If I Uber to work and every time an Uber picks me up it gets me to my destination with 100% success but once a week no Ubers are available, is that a reliable mode of transportation? Would my boss not shout at me to find a more reliable way to get to work?
Eric Brewer's calling, and would like a word.
Availability and correctness are fundamentally opposed. The word "reliable" is contextual.
A backup service that is always available but serves up garbage is not as reliable as one that serves me the correct data, but only on Mondays.
Availability and correctness are fundamentally opposed. The word "reliable" is contextual.
A backup service that is always available but serves up garbage is not as reliable as one that serves me the correct data, but only on Mondays.
Sure, but if you took urber every day and after several years none was available for just one day your boss would forgive you and consider uber reliable. If it suddenly had a lot of failures you would be told to find a new way, but everyone has a few days per year they can't get to work(often sick)
You are talking about a service that appears to have had a single documented outage event over the span of eleven years.
> it does it by reselling S3 at 10x the cost.
Github resells a free product with a fancy UI. Stripe resells visa and mastercard by adding a 5x surcharge to card transactions. Steam resells stripe by adding a 30x markup on that (it doesn't, it uses worldpay but the point stands). Calendly resells an open calendar for $12/month.
This is a reductive argument that doesn't really show why people pay for services. Tarsnap doesn't resell S3 at a 10x markup, it sells a backup service for $0.25/GB/month.
That said,
> it does it by renting a single EC2 server that will bring the service down if it needs to reboot
Yeah, and honestly it's pretty unbelieveable that there's not _two_ servers.
Github resells a free product with a fancy UI. Stripe resells visa and mastercard by adding a 5x surcharge to card transactions. Steam resells stripe by adding a 30x markup on that (it doesn't, it uses worldpay but the point stands). Calendly resells an open calendar for $12/month.
This is a reductive argument that doesn't really show why people pay for services. Tarsnap doesn't resell S3 at a 10x markup, it sells a backup service for $0.25/GB/month.
That said,
> it does it by renting a single EC2 server that will bring the service down if it needs to reboot
Yeah, and honestly it's pretty unbelieveable that there's not _two_ servers.
> at 10x the cost
And that's comparing to S3 Standard. Infrequent Access is 2x cheaper than that, and Glacier Instant Retrieval 6x (if your files aren't tiny).
And that's comparing to S3 Standard. Infrequent Access is 2x cheaper than that, and Glacier Instant Retrieval 6x (if your files aren't tiny).
True enough, but you do get a bit more than just storage from tarsnap. S3 provides storage and an API for uploading things to it, but you can’t just back up your files to S3. You have to figure out what files have changed, compress them, encrypt them, and index them so you can retrieve them again later, etc, etc. That’s a non–trivial amount of software to write. It’d be really great if someone had already done so… Oh look, someone did!
I could imagine purchasing that software for a one–time price, running it myself, and paying AWS for storage. But then I’d have to monitor it, troubleshoot outages, maintain things, etc, etc. Or I could pay someone else to do all of that. I’m not currently a customer, but I know which I prefer.
I could imagine purchasing that software for a one–time price, running it myself, and paying AWS for storage. But then I’d have to monitor it, troubleshoot outages, maintain things, etc, etc. Or I could pay someone else to do all of that. I’m not currently a customer, but I know which I prefer.
Several people have written that software. Duplicati, Borg, Arq for example.
> But then I’d have to monitor it, troubleshoot outages, maintain things, etc, etc.
None of these solutions free you from having to monitor your backups, including Tarsnap. Tarnsap requires setup on your server. You have to make sure it's running and backing up the correct files. And you really should verify you can restore a backup.
I'm really not sure what Tarsnap adds over these aside from saving you from having to sign up for B2 to S3 and punching in an API key.
> But then I’d have to monitor it, troubleshoot outages, maintain things, etc, etc.
None of these solutions free you from having to monitor your backups, including Tarsnap. Tarnsap requires setup on your server. You have to make sure it's running and backing up the correct files. And you really should verify you can restore a backup.
I'm really not sure what Tarsnap adds over these aside from saving you from having to sign up for B2 to S3 and punching in an API key.
Tarsnap preforms asymmetric encryption which lets you perform automated backups without needing to enter any passwords (or otherwise storing your encryption passwords in plain text).
Tarsnap does full deduplication across all backups for any given "machine", while still letting you independently remove any snapshots you like. i.e. no special "full snapshot" that must always be kept around, and no need for multiple full snapshots that have no deduplication between them.
Tarsnap does full deduplication across all backups for any given "machine", while still letting you independently remove any snapshots you like. i.e. no special "full snapshot" that must always be kept around, and no need for multiple full snapshots that have no deduplication between them.
Restic backs up to s3 and it’s quite simple to setup and monitor.
> It's funny because maybe it's a good service but going by HN, it's not reliable or cost effective.
This is a very unfair take, based on basically nothing but the single recent outage report it seems. Tarsnap is generally liked by HN and if you use it, you will know why. Its a great service technically, and _extremely_ affordable. I was a happy user for years but have moved to local time machine backups with B2 offsite replication just because its seamlessly integrated into my NAS (and is also very affordable).
This is a very unfair take, based on basically nothing but the single recent outage report it seems. Tarsnap is generally liked by HN and if you use it, you will know why. Its a great service technically, and _extremely_ affordable. I was a happy user for years but have moved to local time machine backups with B2 offsite replication just because its seamlessly integrated into my NAS (and is also very affordable).
[deleted]
Except that’s not what being a fisherman is like at all
neither is it like that to be a multi millionaire. rare is the multimillionaire who "retires" to a village and enjoys siesta. usually, they want to move even more money (which is fine).
> which is fine
I disagree. I think the world would be a better place if many millionaires had decided to retire instead of trying to extract as much wealth as possible from others.
I disagree. I think the world would be a better place if many millionaires had decided to retire instead of trying to extract as much wealth as possible from others.
Interesting timing... A few weeks ago I evaluated using tarsnap for my business and ended up going for borg + rsync.net, for some of the reasons pointed out in the post. It seemed like the more "professional" option (the website was clearer and the service didn't require me to top-up at irregular intervals). I guess I'm not the intended audience of tarsnap.
I would characterise rsync.net as aiming at a similar market segment. Both of them have a big "by geeks, for geeks" vibe (rsync.net even has a page designed to be sent to your boss if you're recommending it at work), in fact in some ways rsync.net is even more barebones: they don't even provide their own backup utility, it's basically just an SSH login to a ZFS volume. But it is a lot cheaper, it has some unique features like supporting raw ZFS send, and it has the alert-if-your-backup-stops-running feature that tarsnap apparently lacks, as well as the generally friendlier billing approach you mention.
> they don't even provide their own backup utility
They do for Windows: https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/windows_backup_agent.h...
They do for Windows: https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/windows_backup_agent.h...
rsync.net is more expensive than something like backblaze though, which makes me wonder why someone would use it other than for the geek factor.
The OP alluded to tarsnap being the best, but didn't really explain why that is. Rsync too sounds like it'd be fun to use, but it's 3x the price of backblaze b2 and has a minimum order size of ~$10/month
The OP alluded to tarsnap being the best, but didn't really explain why that is. Rsync too sounds like it'd be fun to use, but it's 3x the price of backblaze b2 and has a minimum order size of ~$10/month
For me I use it because of their ZFS send support. It's just way easier with the system I have to use that as opposed to any other option. The cost difference is worth that for my situation (a decent but not huge amount of data and limited time to spend on managing it). (There are also some potential advantages in that it is just an online file store which you can pull from and validate at any time, as opposed to having a specific process for a restore). Also the cost on their website is a starting point, you may find they can go cheaper if it matters to you (and e.g. if you are willing to use a different payment schedule).
> why someone would use it other than for the geek factor.
FWIW I (eventually) moved to rsync.net from BB because of that time BB put some JS on their web interface that sent... was it filenames to Facebook? Something like that. I'm using Restic so it was completely painless.
FWIW I (eventually) moved to rsync.net from BB because of that time BB put some JS on their web interface that sent... was it filenames to Facebook? Something like that. I'm using Restic so it was completely painless.
I've read this before, and I still think it is pretty remarkable for its clarity and the amount of useful, actionable judgement that it contains.
A question: The article is from 2014. So almost a decade has passed. How, if at all, would it be different if it was written today?
A question: The article is from 2014. So almost a decade has passed. How, if at all, would it be different if it was written today?
That's an interesting question because Patrick has gained a ton of experience since then, selling BCC, then doing Appointment Reminder, Starfighter and quite a few years of working for Stripe. Surely that would have resulted in additional insights. He's still active here so maybe he'll chime in.
I was going to ask if any significant changes were made to Tarsnap based on Patrick's previous advice. A cursory inspection of the website indicates "No". Pricing is the same, the messaging is still aimed at geeks, the website design is similar.
If anyone knows of changes that were made, please share.
If anyone knows of changes that were made, please share.
To be honest it looks like reync.net read the article and took it's advice instead. They have a CEO page, though based on the first time the way back machine saw it it might be that patio11 took inspiration from them. [0]
[0] https://www.rsync.net/products/ceopage.html
[0] https://www.rsync.net/products/ceopage.html
This is the problem with outside consultants. They completely miss the point.
Tarsnap is perfect tool for geek2geek backup.
If you position yourself in a new category you get crushed by big companies with lots of money, marketing teams, etc.
Not only that, you will become miserable because you compromise yourself for money. Not everyone wants to build multimillion company.
Tarsnap is perfect tool for geek2geek backup.
If you position yourself in a new category you get crushed by big companies with lots of money, marketing teams, etc.
Not only that, you will become miserable because you compromise yourself for money. Not everyone wants to build multimillion company.
Billing is why tarsnap was too unreliable for prod usage for me. You deposit funds with a credit card, a difficult-to-predict usage calculation occurs based on how many deduplicated blocks of new data and how many API calls you will use in the next few weeks and months, and then eventually, at an essentially random time, you get an email from tarsnap guessing you have about a week of funds left and warning that your data will be deleted a week after that happens. Then a human with admin backup credentials and the org’s credit card in hand must log into the tarsnap website to add funds, resetting the time bomb for another few weeks or months.
Tarsnap is technically impressive and was reliable software, but the billing system requires an unpredictable manual process requiring two credentials held separately in most orgs. Colin has told me in private email that customer deletion is a manual step not taken lightly, but I didn’t feel that one unscheduled manual process was fixed by epicycling on another one.
I migrated away several prod installs to pay more for predictable and automated billing. Even with usage billing that’s not easy to predict, the date of next intervention is printed on the back of the credit card. (Though really, it does cost less - the engineer time it takes to manually add funds costs significantly more than a picodollar.)
Tarsnap is technically impressive and was reliable software, but the billing system requires an unpredictable manual process requiring two credentials held separately in most orgs. Colin has told me in private email that customer deletion is a manual step not taken lightly, but I didn’t feel that one unscheduled manual process was fixed by epicycling on another one.
I migrated away several prod installs to pay more for predictable and automated billing. Even with usage billing that’s not easy to predict, the date of next intervention is printed on the back of the credit card. (Though really, it does cost less - the engineer time it takes to manually add funds costs significantly more than a picodollar.)
I'm a sysadmin, but not the one who pays bills at my job. It drives me crazy when a service doesn't have separate technical and billing contacts.
And it wastes my time when I get emails about billing renewals. And the billing person at my company doesn't see the email unless I forward it.
And it wastes my time when I get emails about billing renewals. And the billing person at my company doesn't see the email unless I forward it.
Interesting previous discussion from 2014:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523953 (311 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523953 (311 comments)
Looking forward to Colin's rebuttal, "What I would do if I ran Bingo Card Generator for a while and then quit"
He already holds the best HN rebuttal of all time:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
That one never gets old. I swear I still chuckle at it so many years later.
There was a time when I enjoyed the tone of these posts, but re-reading them years after I'm kind of annoyed by them.
I might agree with about half of the points in them, but it still grates somehow.
I might agree with about half of the points in them, but it still grates somehow.
So that kind of thinking is why every second thing I’d like to hobby-use is priced as a free trial with one missing crucial feature, then $300/mo. It might be rational even, but I’d expect the actual utility does have a negative term for I’m going to hate your service with a fiery passion (and probably also you) if you do this. (Cf recent discussion on customer “support” chatbots.)
> let’s boil it down to a simple intuition: people getting more value out of Tarsnap should pay more for it
That’s basically the definition of a discriminating monopolist and what gets you airline-style inscrutable pricing and the SSO tax, isn’t it? Again, screw that noise. I can’t really motivate this well, but to a first approximation I (a) dislike seeing pricing disconnected from costs; (b) cannot resist the urge to minmax thus cannot help disliking people who make it more difficult than it absolutely needs to be. Note that this does not contradict TFA’s conclusions, unlike the previous point, and another argument in it is actually very close to (b); it’s this specific argument for the conclusion that I’m disagreeing with.
> You know how every ToS ever has the “You are not allowed to use $SERVICE for illegal purposes” despite there being no convenient way to enforce that in computer code?
Yes I do, and I feel basically the same way about that as I do about stupid laws everybody tacitly agrees not to enforce: it erodes the whole edifice of a law/bureaucracy-based Enlightenment society. If you’ve put it in writing and not planning to sue over violations, you’re lying to me.