Late yesterday, Amazon announced a change to their Amazon S3 pricing effective November 1st. They will now offer bulk pricing, with pricing tiers all the way down to $0.12 per gigabyte. Of course this won’t directly affect most Jungle Disk users – the first discount pricing tier starts at 50TB, and very few of our users have that much data.
The good news is that this change will allow us to implement a new billing option we’ve been wanting to add since launch – the option to have a single account and single bill with both software and storage fees, rather than receiving separate monthly bills from Amazon and Jungle Disk. The current process of setting up Jungle Disk requires setting up multiple accounts, copying long random keys during configuration, and can be confusing to many users. As we expand our reach to a less technically savvy crowd, it’s important for us to keep our signup process as streamlined as possible, lest new users be turned off by the complexity. Although we’ve wanted to do this for over a year now, it wouldn’t have been practical previously without raising storage prices. This bulk pricing will allow us to aggregate the storage costs of multiple users and use the discount to cover our billing and overhead costs.
How will this new option affect existing users when it gets rolled out early next year? It won’t – you’ll still be using your existing Amazon S3 account, and still be billed directly by Amazon. New users will have a choice between simple integrated billing, or going through the current process to sign up for direct billing from Amazon. Pricing will be the same either way – we aren’t planning on marking up the $0.15 per gigabyte price at all.
Over the next few months before this option is available we’ll be providing more details on how it works and how your data will be secure no matter what option you choose. The ability to offer an integrated billing option will be a significant advantage to us as we strive to make Jungle Disk fun and easy for everyone to use.
5 Comments
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Zach said,
October 9, 2008 @ 10:21 am
So existing customers will have the chance to switch over? I would do it just to make adding machines easier…
Jungle Dave said,
October 9, 2008 @ 11:38 am
While we don’t think most existing customers would migrate, we are planning to allow it for those that would like simpler billing.
Matt said,
December 16, 2008 @ 9:18 pm
I can’t wait ’til this feature is available.
I’m the designated “IT guy” for most of my family – I’d prefer not to take them all through the hassle of setting up their own S3 accounts, but I really do want to help them with a better backup solution. JungleDisk is my preferred choice due to the minimal overhead, ease of use and reliability. I’ve put off looking at other solutions for them whilst I wait for this feature to come online!
Bryce said,
May 6, 2009 @ 3:57 am
Wait a moment. You say “we aren’t planning on marking up the $0.15 per gigabyte price at all”, but just above you speak about bulk pricing at $0.12. I’m assuming JungleDisk will take the spread. S3 will bill JungleDisk 12 cents, JungleDisk will bill the user 15 cents. Nothing wrong with that of course. But the statement seems inconsistent.
Jungle Dave said,
May 7, 2009 @ 9:14 am
If you use over 50TB we’re happy to talk to you about a volume discount, but for most users the <50TB 15c rate is what you’ll pay.