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Ask Slashdot: Data Storage Highway Robbery?

Posted by timothy on from the airwave-robbery-is-very-common dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I just learned that Salesforce charges $3000 per year for 1GB of extra data storage. That puts it in line with hardware storage costs from about 1993. We've all heard of telcos and ISPs charging ridiculous rates per MB when limits are reached — what's the most ridiculous rate that you've heard?"

7 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. it's not really just storage by Trepidity · · Score: 5, Informative

    There's a brief explanation here. The gist of it is that Salesforce.com's storage charge is charging you for the storage plus the expected transactions/querying that you'll do on the larger amount of data. I suppose they could break out storage charges and transaction/query charges into separate billing items, but they seem to prefer to charge based on just the amount of data, perhaps assuming that overall workloads scale roughly with total data-set size, making it a good billing proxy.

    The other reason is that salesforce.com is targeted at The Enterprise, where anything below five digits is noise.

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    10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
    1. Re:it's not really just storage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's worth noting that companies waste storage like crazy in Salesforce. Give your sales staff free reign, and you'll easily use that space up on PDF's, gigantic image assets for email designs that change every other day, etc.

      I think the deal is that they're really not in the storage business. If you're using the software the way it's intended you're unlikely to hit your limit, since simple records in a database take up no space.

      If you're making a new PDF quote, storing it in SF's service, then emailing your clients an HTML email that changes every two days, with quote PDF's attached out of SF... you'll end up hitting the ceiling quick.

  2. Have you ever... by pev · · Score: 3, Informative

    ... Looked at the cost of SMS messages comparing price vs bytes?! According to wikipedia, average cost is around $0.11 per 160 char message. So, excluding headers and taking k as 1024, thats $738,197 per gigabyte. Now think about what a roaming message costs... Maybe triple that? Thats got to be a great little earner for the telcos...! Not to mention, sms was designed to take advantage of unused bandwidth space anyway, so its all gravy!

  3. Re:SMS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I suppose the parent is flagged offtopic because of the wrong unit. It should be ~$700 per MB, not per KB.

    Or in my case, since SMS costs me $0.25 (send or receive) then a megabyte costs ~$1800.

    Sending a gigabyte via SMS would cost me $1.8 million dollars. Plus regulatory fees.

  4. Re:Ripoff Prices -- Roll Your Own Solution by jockm · · Score: 5, Informative

    Dropbox only gives 2GB for free and 100GB for 199 a year.

    100G on Dropbox is $9.99/mo or $99.00/year. 200G is 199 a year...

    But you are paying for backups, file versioning, sharing features, API, reliability etc. I pay for Dropbox because I don't want to admin a box and worry about all of that. For me at least it is worth it. If it isn't for you, then you don't have to use it...

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    What do you know I wrote a novel
  5. Re:SMS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Because SMS works without internet access, dimwit.

  6. Re:SMS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Because SMS is universal for anyone with a cell phone. No need to have apps to connect to friends as then you would need App 1 for some friends, App 2 for other friends who don't use App 1, App 3 for other friends who don't use App 1 or 2, and so on.