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.)
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.
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.
> We’ll keep prosumer entry points around mainly because I think Colin will go nuclear if I suggest otherwise
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
---
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.
pushcx|2 years ago
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.)
justin_oaks|2 years ago
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.
shubhamjain|2 years ago
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.
vasco|2 years ago
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.
dools|2 years ago
mananaysiempre|2 years ago
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.
edanm|2 years ago
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?
zvorygin|2 years ago
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.
abofh|2 years ago
dools|2 years ago
peteforde|2 years ago
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.
jacquesm|2 years ago
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.
idlewords|2 years ago
pearjuice|2 years ago
wofo|2 years ago
rcxdude|2 years ago
andyjohnson0|2 years ago
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?
jacquesm|2 years ago
jpgvm|2 years ago
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.
idlewords|2 years ago
sokoloff|2 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
triska|2 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523953 (311 comments)
rudasn|2 years ago
ugjka|2 years ago
isawczuk|2 years ago
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.
akkartik|2 years ago
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.
---
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.
jms703|2 years ago
Aeolun|2 years ago
I might agree with about half of the points in them, but it still grates somehow.
manicennui|2 years ago
projectileboy|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
RGamma|2 years ago
[deleted]
itmediaseo|2 years ago
[deleted]
itmediaseo|2 years ago
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