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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Reminds me of the adage of a Mexican fisherman.<p>> “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!”<p>> “Millions? Really? And after that?” asked the fishermen.<p>> “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.”<p>> “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.
> We’ll keep prosumer entry points around mainly because I think Colin will go nuclear if I suggest otherwise<p>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>I’m going to hate your service with a fiery passion (and probably also you) if you do this</i>. (Cf recent discussion on customer “support” chatbots.)<p>> let’s boil it down to a simple intuition: people getting more value out of Tarsnap should pay more for it<p>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.<p>> 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?<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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'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.<p>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?
This is basically a masterpiece in missing the point of Tarsnap IMO.<p>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.<p>Just customers that know what they are buying, are happy to pay for it and software that is exemplary.
This is the problem with outside consultants. They completely miss the point.<p>Tarsnap is perfect tool for geek2geek backup.<p>If you position yourself in a new category you get crushed by big companies with lots of money, marketing teams, etc.<p>Not only that, you will become miserable because you compromise yourself for money.
Not everyone wants to build multimillion company.
I nodded along when I first read this, but ten years later I have two, more complex, reactions.<p>Reaction #1: Whoa, that's a lot of assumption that serious professionals operate within incorporated businesses, anybody else is frivolous.<p>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. <a href="https://prospect.org/health/2023-07-29-shock-treatment-emergency-room" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://prospect.org/health/2023-07-29-shock-treatment-emerg...</a>). They also go off on strategic misadventures, destabilizing the product for existing customers while chasing more lucrative ones.<p>A caricature, yes. But a more accurate caricature I think than the one in OP.<p>---<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>I might agree with about half of the points in them, but it still grates somehow.