jaredthirsk

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  1. A while ago, I'd say $29.95 for pack of 3 licenses, if the source code was open (still using their centralized trackers). Now, the bugs and changing interface put me off, and what really put me off is their 2.0 limit of 10 folders -- I don't trust them anymore. I have been migrating to Syncthing and the future there seems promising. A new windows GUI has popped up (Synctrayzor) in the last few weeks that is much more user-friendly for the average user. It makes me happy. If BT could find a way to monetize something that makes people happy, maybe we could all be happy.
  2. It is so close to what they are doing that it is painful to watch them blow it! There are tons of people here saying they're willing to hand over $40 for a perpetual license for a product! But instead they are leaving. So if you or BT can't figure out how it is different, then you need to stop and think about it. (You can say, the customer is wrong, *harumph*, and be sad and poor that these whiners leave, or you can repair the customer-business relationship, and get them to happily and enthusiastically hand over money. In this scenario, blaming the customer is a needless tragedy.) ... pause for thinking. Ok. It is different in that: You buy a product, and keep that product forever if you don't want to renew.As has been pointed out frequently here, there is a lot of value in the software as it is now that warrants $40. If they add a bunch of cool features, in a year it might be worth another $40 to have the latest and greatest. That choice should be up to us. We should not be imprisoned to vendor lock-in and future price hikes, and the threat of BT dying and taking out our software. It (virtually) doesn't cost BT any more if users have 10 folders or 30 folders, so it just angers users to be charged for something that does not cost anybody anything. The software cost BT a lot of money to create, but BT isn't charging for that -- they are charging for something perceived as meaningless. It is indeed harder to earn $40/year from software updates, but for fans and true believers, we have an emotional connection that wants to feel the software vendor is earning it. We are biased to want to believe.Also, a discounted yearly renewal can get customers to feel better about it, which is why I propose a higher price point for the initial purchase. (Maybe a $10 discount is too small. $49.99 / $29.99 might help reach a wider audience anyway. I think above $50 might be too high, and above $30 for renewal might seem too much if the new features aren't earthshattering.) BT could also charge: $5/year per person for hosting a central tracker (included in the yearly subscription), or else force people to use a free central tracker put up by random people on the internet, or set up their own.Everybody gets 5-30 free folders in the official tracker, after that you pay. I'd maybe pay for this -- might need it for sharing with family/strangers who aren't going to be using a random tracker, or my private tracker.*THIS* is where a service subscription makes sense, and it is worth peanuts per year, not the price of a software product per year. $x/year for X GB storage on a cloud, (Free 20GB included in yearly subscription)This also makes sense as a service-based subscription.I think this only has value to many of us if the source is open. If they are irrational about their software not being good enough to stand on its own merit, maybe they are also irrational about opening the source code.I would perceive all of this as positive. The way it is presented now seems like a giant screw you, we're taking away the functionality we offered, and now you have to pay perpetually on an ongoing basis to be our prisoners. There is a possibly irrational and ungrounded fear that they can't win people over to buy their software as a product when it is probably the best sync software to come along in 10 years, with no real strong competitors in the mass market right now. (I know there are some commercial products, but many of us never even look at them them since they don't have free versions we can try.) Some people stick with old versions of software, but many like to upgrade to the latest. They may look at the money they would not be getting from from non-renewers of software (who would upgrade only intermittently, every few years) and people who can't be enticed by premium features -- but look at this thread of all of the customers they are losing forever! And these people will fuel the momentum of a competitor! Greed and fear can inspire business people to make wrong business decisions that end up being less lucrative and I think that is what is happening.
  3. This 2.0 thing sounds like a turn for the worse, and loss of trust. A lot of us came to BT Sync because we want more control and trust over our data than cloud storage, and want our data on computers we trust. (And many want anonymity and the option for complete decentralization. And the ability to keep using a software/protocol if a company dies or decides to hike fees.) Being an untrusting and do it yourself userbase, we also want to be able to trust the software, as in open source. Closed souce aka "trust us, our code is good" or "we passed an audit once, isn't that awesome, and since then we have written bug free code, because we are perfect human beings" is kinda like dropbox saying "trust us, our servers are good" and "we will only give your data away if the government asks really nicely". It doesn't fly. I understand the desire to make money, but to handicap free users at 10 folders is a pretty big blow. I would have thought you would be more interested in cultivating your reputation as a company that fosters trust and provides value people are willing to pay for, rather than burning trust and reducing current value to make a money grab. Hey, how's this for a business model: open source the code already, offer to host peoples' bulk encrypted data on the cloud in multiple locations around the globe for a price -- I'd consider giving you money for that over hosting my own BT Sync boxes in geographically diverse places, or paying Microsoft/Amazon/Google for cloud storage, or convincing my family members to buy a 4TB drive attached to an always on linux box. Charge something like $49.99 per major version of BTSync with premium features (like the ones you mentioned 2.0 such as pause folder, which I didn't even finish reading because I am so ticked off), with free updates for a year and a $40 yearly renewal, or better yet, don't worry about major version numbers and simply give people the latest version for $49.99/year, or renewing at $40. Maybe I should be your CFO. Also, don't cap folders -- the user should have freedom here. If there was a cap for a premium version, it should be more like 50+ folders. My interest has been declining as other open source solution(s) become more mature but this really pushes things over the edge. i got multiple members of my family on it (which eats into that 10 folder share limit pretty fast when we share photo albums, video albums, and host each others' backups!), and now I'm going to have to get them all to switch to something else :-/. You rose because you captured the imagination of people like me who were ahead of the tech curve -- if you lose us, where will that leave you? Maybe you will find a (uninformed? non-savvy?) market segment that works for you -- if so power to you -- I can't argue with capitalism, and I love to see the dropbox / moby types sweat a little even if I'm not the target audience of either. And over most of the life of BT Sync so far I have appreciated the useful tool -- thanks for that. So cheers and good luck! PS - ...just finished reading this entire thread. [REMOVED] and like many others I would have gladly given $40 one time for the value provided up til now, especially if the not-syncing issues were resolved and they stopped messing with how it worked. But after this perceived betrayal I would rather donate it to an open source cause that is more likely to fulfill my long term desires. Someone even showed up on an open source forum to say they wanted to donate out of spite. People are that upset! Like I said above, I'd also pay for hosting IF the software was open source with client-side encryption). And I understand the disdain [REMOVED] But make no mistake, barring some extremely dramatic turnaround, this will be one of the top 10 tech fiascoes of the decade. This is the kind of move that could and/or should get executives/CFOs fired. Maybe BT Sync will succeed financially in a more niche role (in which case the CFO might get a fat bonus and the execs can stop thinking much about how to help humanity and simply preen their niche user-base while planning company team holidays to exotic locations), but this is a crippling move in terms of widespread adoption and solving the sync problem on a mass scale. Instead of having an army of tens of thousands of tech enthusiasts getting all their friends and family to install BTSync, you now have much of that same army providing negative adertising, warning everyone to stay away from what is now perceived as an untrustworthy company that not only breaks promises but charges based on what they can think they get away with rather than what value they are providing (it may be fair game in a supply and demand market to charge nonsensical subscription fees in the absence of direct competition, but it comes at the price of bad faith to those who are not ignorant that the company is using their monopoly position to charge an inflated premium to the customer). It is difficult to watch this happen, but with all of the strange little twists to BTSync's interface, I can't say I am entirely surprised about what seems to me to be bad judgment (if people like me are the target market, which I am doubting.) BT people: If you decide to backtrack, please know that doing a minor correction isn't going to repair this breach of trust. I think many of us are going to be looking for a mea culpa and dramatic turnaround in strategy if we are to be won back. The choice lies with you. Good luck. Moving forward (and giving BT some insight into my headspace and the state of the competitive playing field): SyncThing has been a great drop-in replacement for me, and while it has its limits, I have been using it happily without any real issues, although I haven't really tried it on Android. I don't have a huge deal of confidence in their current developers to take it to the next level. (Last I could tell, they don't seem to think it is an issue that there is no iOS client, and were ok with crippling it with a GPL license that is incompatible with app stores -- I think they are either insane or shortsighted. And the Pulse/ind.ie guys aren't interested in solving sync but in destroying Facebook, or something.) So I think there is still room for open source developers to join up with syncthing and hold their hands to take them to new heights, or room for a new company to fork it (i.e. when it was last licensed under a permissive license so that you can get to iOS, like ind.ie did), or start something new. There are a lot of people on this thread, including me, who would be willing to put $$$ into supporting a PRODUCT (not a bittorrent tracker subscription scam) that does what BTSync set out to do (maybe with regional hosting as an optional service so I didn't have to convince my family to set up huge HDs on always-on servers that I can park my data on -- a painful problem that I would pay to resolve). And there is still room for a company to solve sync for the masses with business mindset more like Evernote that is friendly to free consumers and provides extra value for premium features. Now, we have nowhere to put that money!!!! If that isn't a recipe for a kickstarter campaign, I don't know what is! Somebody please save us. It is 2015 and we have robots that can play table tennis, but we still have not solved this relatively simple problem! BT: you have a choice: do you want to try to be a part of the solution to this problem or not? Making money doesn't have to be a zero-sum game (contra helping the masses), you know!
  4. I have half migrated away from BT Sync to an open source competitor that I'm sure people know of. I heard of grumblings about 2.0 and I came here with a bucket of popcorn to laugh at the anger and see what the fuss is about, but then I fired up my Android tablet and found out it auto upgraded (darnit!) and wants me to create an account or something! Yikes! After the shock, I was just about to switch more folders over to the competitor (I have more than 10 total), but this APK link to reinstall 1.4 has bought BT Sync a little more life! Thanks! (A little more time for BT inc to consider undoing the 2.0 damage.) And general comment: this 2.0 thing sounds like a turn for the worse, and loss of trust. A lot of us came to BT Sync because we want more control and trust over our data than cloud storage, and want our data on computers we trust. (And some want anonymity and complete decentralization.) Being an untrusting and do it yourself userbase, we also want to be able to trust the software, as in open source. Closed souce aka "trust us, our code is good" or "we passed an audit once, isn't that awesome, and since then we have written bug free code" is kinda like dropbox saying "trust us, our servers are good" and "we will only give your data away if the government asks really nicely". It doesn't fly. I understand the desire to make money, but to handicap free users at 10 folders is a pretty big blow. I would have thought you would be more interested in cultivating your reputation as a company that fosters trust and provides value people are willing to pay for, rather than burning trust to make a money grab. I don't fully understand, but it sounds like a promise has been breached with offering 1.4 functionality in 2.0. (How's this for a business model: open source the code already, host peoples' bulk encrypted data on the cloud for a price -- I'd consider giving you money for that over hosting my own BT Sync boxes in geographically diverse places, or paying Microsoft/Amazon/Google for cloud storage.) My interest has been declining as other open source solution(s) become more mature but this really pushes things over the edge. i got multiple members of my family on it (which eats into that 10 folder share limit pretty fast when we share photo albums, video albums, and host each others' backups!), and now I'm going to have to get them all to switch to something else :-/. You rose because you captured the imagination of people like me who were ahead of the tech curve -- if you lose us, where will that leave you? Maybe you will find a (uninformed? non-savvy?) market segment that works for you -- if so power to you -- I can't argue with capitalism, and I love to see the dropbox types sweat a little. And over most of the life of BT Sync so far I have appreciated the useful tool -- thanks for that. So cheers and good luck!