Lots of online apps differentiate pricing based on storage. I’d much rather they didn’t offer storage, and let me plugin S3 / Dropbox / etc.I was realizing this as I was looking at the pricing plan for Huddle (which is project management sorta like Basecamp):
Storage seems to be one of the major items of differentiation. But I *know* what the “floor” of pricing is: It’s 10Β’ / GB. So the actual cost, from left to right, is 10Β’, 25Β’, $1, $2. OK, OK — a few handful of cents more for bandwidth transfer, but it comes down to … not much. So, dear web app provider, please don’t over value the storage you are so graciously marking up in price. And in fact, offering document storage in your web app is actually a *pain in the a$$*. You have files on your desktop, you have files attached to certain messages in Basecamp, in you have file revisioning (or whatever) in web app X. It’s the forwarding documents over email problem all over - which is the newest copy, where is the file, who can edit the original, etc. Let me give you an example. At work, we’re happy users of Batchblue’s Batchbook - it’s CRM a bit like 37 Signals’ Highrise, with some niceties. One of the things you can do is forward email into it, including with attachments, and it will sit in there. So, a workflow where someone sends you a presentation, that you’d like attached / organized with that person, works really nicely. Except, when I want to actually read that presentation, I have to download it to my computer, and read it there. Every other person in my work group that wants to read it? Also has to separately and manually download it. Same goes for editing. Download, edit, re-upload. So, we stick that document in Dropbox. And it gets synced automatically, and everyone has it on their desktop, easy to read in full binary document format, be it Word, Powerpoint, or whatever. And everyone can add notes, or edit it as needed. That’s how I expect seamless cloud storage / document sharing to work. Here’s my call to action: When you’re designing your next web app, please allow me to enter my existing Amazon S3 or Dropbox account as part of setup. Call it “Bring your own Storage“, and lower your prices appropriately. P.S. Of course, there is a Dropbox API module for Drupal already.
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