They're obviously not going to be making much more money from this. 95.5% of users do not store more than a TB. From the brief snippet provided, it doesn't seem like a bait-and-switch was their intention.
> the low demand combined with the growing number of suspected abusers
Probably what has happened is that the ones taking highest advantage of the infinite space are also doing it against the TOS, and bitcasa has found this to be a very difficult problem to solve. For example, running some video site and hosting all the content on bitcasa is probably something lots of people try to do, which is probably against thier TOS. I bet the storage space for these users alone may even have been okay, but the bandwidth and resources needed to monitor & prevent TOS violations added up.
It sounds to me like they are probably not even counting on much revenue from the 10TB plan. It's mostly there so they can claim they offered a fair chance to people needing more space who might be abusers. And instead of paying they'll just leave the platform, which maybe they're just okay with. The pricing is also along the lines of Drive/Dropbox now, so it doesn't seem particularly malevolent.
> Probably what has happened is that the ones taking highest advantage of the infinite space are also doing it against the TOS
The thing is that, realistically, they have no way to know. That same model that doesn't allow them to see what people use their account for, also doesn't allow them to assess how much of the usage is against TOS. At best, it's a suspected problem, and that doesn't seem like a reasonable cause for mass-deleting user data. Plus, I'm not sure I see how "usage against TOS" is a problem to begin with, if it's not adversely affecting their legal status or infrastructure (which it doesn't appear to, given their post).
> For example, running some video site and hosting all the content on bitcasa is probably something lots of people try to do, which is probably against thier TOS.
I can see this being a problem, but it's easily solved by eg. capping bandwidth for the account at 100mbps when you go over 1TB space used. Nobody is going to successfully run a video site of considerable size - which over 1TB of data would be - on a 100mbps connection. It would still suck for large users, but at the very least their data won't get deleted.
Even if they had no intention to suck more money out of people, at best their 'solution' would be so mindnumbingly and obviously inappropriate that somebody would have had to realize it wasn't a reasonable solution.
It seems weird to not only get rid of your hook (infinite storage - which they got rid of a while ago) and raising your prices for less product. And to boot, they aren't grandfathering anybody in.
I was a beta tester and at one point a paying customer. I left after they originally did away with infinite storage and the other cloud offerings became more attractive (Google Drive and One Drive). Visiting their website now makes it seem that they really want out of the consumer space and want to cater more to business/enterprise.
I personally don't hold out much hope they'll be around in a year or two.
Yeah, it's a bit bait-and-switch-y. Their promise of infinite storage was never credible. (Neither were their promises about confidentiality, but that's a different subject.) Now that a bunch of people have taken advantage of what was offered, the rates go up and people who can't possibly transfer all that data somewhere else in time get stuck paying ransom. Then there's the whole "suspected abusers" and "seems impossible for individual usage" paragraph. Way to go, guys. Blame the people who took you at your word for everything. What a class act.
Bitcasa has always had atrocious customer service.
I used their infinite plan for a year but stopped when 20gb of my data suddenly disappeared from my drive. The response I got from customer support was basically "what do you want us to do about it? You should back up all your data."
Thankfully I did have a secondary backup, but yeah... I never got the feeling anyone at that company gave a damn about the customers.
What I have not seen anyone mention is that claims of low usage trends combined with smelly abusers are exactly the same claims made by mobile providers and cable companies when they decide to arbitrarily cap their offerings.
We have to keep in mind how one-sided and unprovable these claims are.
I used their service for backing up my media files (music, videos, pictures, etc.). Total amount of data is about 1.7TB. This new pricing means I am in $99 per month plan vs. the $99 per year I had. I am just going to cancel and move to backblaze. The bitcasa performance was never the best but since I just ran Rsync with a cron job in the background I never really cared.
- They're advertising a provably nonexistent (at the very least flawed) 'Zero Knowledge' environment (third parties such as Plex can be given access to your data, which means that the server has the keys required to access plaintext)
- They're closing down their consumer API[0], breaking third party services like Plex
- They're no longer cost competitive, as hubiC[1] beats them on price (plus it's French)
Overall it looks like they're just no longer interested at all in the consumer market and they're trying to get business customers.
Given the performance issues, unreliability, broken promises (Linux client, API) and fraud (security promises) that's gone on since beta (which was in 2012 by the way, they've been pulling this crap for 2 years now), I'll be requesting the refund they offer and moving elsewhere (probably hubiC).
P.S. is anyone aware of either:
- A decent SpiderOak alternative service
- A good, cross platform, S3 compatible sync client with client side encryption
This is definitely underhanded. I have to say that I didn't believe their offer from the beginning, though. There are just a couple of "unlimited backup" services out there - Crashplan and Backblaze - and they make it pretty hard to upload a ton of data to them.
11 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 32.9 ms ] thread> the low demand combined with the growing number of suspected abusers
Probably what has happened is that the ones taking highest advantage of the infinite space are also doing it against the TOS, and bitcasa has found this to be a very difficult problem to solve. For example, running some video site and hosting all the content on bitcasa is probably something lots of people try to do, which is probably against thier TOS. I bet the storage space for these users alone may even have been okay, but the bandwidth and resources needed to monitor & prevent TOS violations added up.
It sounds to me like they are probably not even counting on much revenue from the 10TB plan. It's mostly there so they can claim they offered a fair chance to people needing more space who might be abusers. And instead of paying they'll just leave the platform, which maybe they're just okay with. The pricing is also along the lines of Drive/Dropbox now, so it doesn't seem particularly malevolent.
Sucks it had to happen though.
The thing is that, realistically, they have no way to know. That same model that doesn't allow them to see what people use their account for, also doesn't allow them to assess how much of the usage is against TOS. At best, it's a suspected problem, and that doesn't seem like a reasonable cause for mass-deleting user data. Plus, I'm not sure I see how "usage against TOS" is a problem to begin with, if it's not adversely affecting their legal status or infrastructure (which it doesn't appear to, given their post).
> For example, running some video site and hosting all the content on bitcasa is probably something lots of people try to do, which is probably against thier TOS.
I can see this being a problem, but it's easily solved by eg. capping bandwidth for the account at 100mbps when you go over 1TB space used. Nobody is going to successfully run a video site of considerable size - which over 1TB of data would be - on a 100mbps connection. It would still suck for large users, but at the very least their data won't get deleted.
Even if they had no intention to suck more money out of people, at best their 'solution' would be so mindnumbingly and obviously inappropriate that somebody would have had to realize it wasn't a reasonable solution.
I was a beta tester and at one point a paying customer. I left after they originally did away with infinite storage and the other cloud offerings became more attractive (Google Drive and One Drive). Visiting their website now makes it seem that they really want out of the consumer space and want to cater more to business/enterprise.
I personally don't hold out much hope they'll be around in a year or two.
I used their infinite plan for a year but stopped when 20gb of my data suddenly disappeared from my drive. The response I got from customer support was basically "what do you want us to do about it? You should back up all your data."
Thankfully I did have a secondary backup, but yeah... I never got the feeling anyone at that company gave a damn about the customers.
We have to keep in mind how one-sided and unprovable these claims are.
Recently found Back Blaze and I'm sticking with them plus they are cheaper.
- They're advertising a provably nonexistent (at the very least flawed) 'Zero Knowledge' environment (third parties such as Plex can be given access to your data, which means that the server has the keys required to access plaintext)
- They're closing down their consumer API[0], breaking third party services like Plex
- They're no longer cost competitive, as hubiC[1] beats them on price (plus it's French)
Overall it looks like they're just no longer interested at all in the consumer market and they're trying to get business customers.
Given the performance issues, unreliability, broken promises (Linux client, API) and fraud (security promises) that's gone on since beta (which was in 2012 by the way, they've been pulling this crap for 2 years now), I'll be requesting the refund they offer and moving elsewhere (probably hubiC).
P.S. is anyone aware of either:
- A decent SpiderOak alternative service
- A good, cross platform, S3 compatible sync client with client side encryption
[0] - http://forums.bitcasa.com/index.php?/topic/2091-dear-develop... [1] - https://hubic.com/en/
Kyle Pererra Online Community Specialist at Bitcasa Kyle@bitcasa.com
Allen Lai Director, Technical Support at Bitcasa Allen@bitcasa.com
Brian E. Taptich CEO at Bitcasa Brian@bitcasa.com
David Lai VP of Engineering at Bitcasa David@bitcasa.com
Luke Behnke VP of Product at Bitcasa Luke@bitcasa.com