On Wed, Mar 6, 2024, at 4:03 AM, Scott Wheeler wrote:
To me the audience for Tarsnap is the privacy minded part of the public. Having payment details on file sort of contradicts the mission. That's (I'm guessing) why tarsnap is 100% pre-paid.
You're free not to use it, or create your own process for regularly topping up the balance. Heck, you could even put $50 there and probably have a lifetime of storage (it's been a while since I used tarsnap, but back when it was /dirt cheap/ and I imagine storage costs have not increased significantly over time.
You’re free to think that, but my company has spent thousands (perhaps over $10k at this point?) on Tarsnap, so I don’t have a bad feeling saying, “I love the service, but this part I find kind of dumb” is out of the range of reasonable customer feedback. It’s reasonable to keep in mind that there are different kinds of customers on this list, and that for some of us $50 is not what we’re talking about. I suspect what pays Collin’s rent are the customers that pay that much every month.
-Scott
I don't suspect there is much of a profit margin, but let's not argue things we hardly can know¹. I agree this is valid feedback. I also took it seriously by providing what I think is reasonable explanation.
I will remind you that calling a missing feature "insane" is not usually part of "reasonable customer feedback", so I might have been a little more curt in my response just to balance things out. There you go,
Peace
¹ I half-remember Colin writing about this many years ago but (a) I'm not searching for it (b) things may have changed over time