by reubano on 7/30/23, 5:13 AM with 84 comments
by pushcx on 7/30/23, 10:17 AM
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.)
by shubhamjain on 7/30/23, 9:07 AM
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.
by mananaysiempre on 7/30/23, 8:30 AM
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.
by peteforde on 7/30/23, 8:38 AM
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.
by wofo on 7/30/23, 9:27 AM
by andyjohnson0 on 7/30/23, 9:33 AM
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?
by jpgvm on 7/30/23, 4:56 PM
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.
by idlewords on 7/30/23, 11:23 AM
by triska on 7/30/23, 10:54 AM
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523953 (311 comments)
by rudasn on 7/30/23, 7:51 AM
by isawczuk on 7/30/23, 10:08 AM
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.
by akkartik on 7/30/23, 4:30 PM
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.
by jms703 on 7/30/23, 5:14 PM
by Aeolun on 7/30/23, 11:37 AM
I might agree with about half of the points in them, but it still grates somehow.
by manicennui on 7/30/23, 5:16 PM