Starting July 1, 2025, Storj will introduce a $5 minimum monthly usage fee for all accounts. This helps cover the cost of payment processing and basic operations so we can continue offering fast, secure, and reliable storage—even for small accounts.
Stoj just announced a $5 minimum. Literally set up a friend yesterday with them who only has ~200GB to backup 
Any recommendations for another option for them? B2?
Yeah. I’m actively looking. And not because $5/month is a such a big deal, my usage was higher anyway – but because once the company starts nickel and dimming their customers it’s all downhill from there, and I don’t want to use their services or associate with them in any way on principle. I left Wasabi for similar reasons.
I understand, they want to reduce support costs on small scale customers but there are much better ways to do that. Minimum fees are BS 100% of the time – punishing users for not using the service enough – lol. And then giving users 1 day notice, on the weekend (!), to delete data or face minimum charge next month?! WTF was that?
I feel bad for having trusted them, and recommending them in the past. In fact, I have deleted my data from the service today, and waiting for their account deletion process next week after the last period billing.
With 200 GB you can use literally any service – amazon, google cloud, etc. The price is irrelevant, it’s too little data, it will be few bucks either way.
Personal anecdote: due to inevitable Enshittification of these cloud services my primary backup for the past few years has been a NAS at friends house. In fact, we do three way sync between three NASes across the country (zfs replication over zerotier). Yes, it’s way more expensive (electricity costs mostly; hardware is fixed cost and is cheap – old decommissioned enterprise parts), but I control everything, and I don’t have to put up with nonsense like this.
After all, any cloud storage is just somebody else’s computer. I’d rather it be mine and people I trust. I’m so done with this nonsense…
So perhaps consider that. If you have a Nas – let your friend backup to it via Zerotier or TailScale.
To clarify, it’s a one month and two day notice as it starts July 1st. Still sucks though.
I actually do have a NAS that I backup to with SFTP. Ill offer them to back up to it too on my tailnet and show them how to set up encryption. Wish it was easier to just find a good consistent cloud service tho
I’m running an experiment with GCS using their “autoclass” feature, as suggested by a forum member here. I’m backing up 100Gb and so far not seeing any surprise costs. As your data auto-migrates to colder storage, your costs go down, a lot. But because it’s all managed automatically, I don’t have to worry about surprise fees for trying to access cold storage. For my 100Gb, the price is looking like this:
$2 first month
$1 months 2 and 3
$0.40 months 4–12
$0.12/month after that
So that’s less than $8 the first year, and after that it gets ridiculously cheap. If I upload say 1Gb of new data per month, then I’ll pay .20 for that data in month one, .10 in months 2-3, etc. – so maybe another $1/year extra. If someone is adding big chunks of data regularly, I don’t know if the math is as good.
It’s $0.12/Gb to restore, so in a total crisis, I’d spend $12 to restore all my data. Happy to pay that if such a situation arises.
One note: Google Cloud Console monitoring reports a fairly high (around 50%) “client error rate” whenever duplicacy backs up. I see no errors on my end, so I don’t really know what this means. I’m also running a backup to GCS using restic, and I see 0% error rate there.
Storj is reacting on the massive backlash, and with more transparency, longer notice, and possible exemption for customers paying in tokens, if materialized, would remove most of my objections.
Let’s see what happens within next few weeks.
I recently discovered a relatively new provider called SystemFreaks, and they seem to have a pretty good deal on object storage: https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/205692/s3-compatible-object-storage-secure-cloud-storage-3-tb-eu-ca-6-tb-singapore/p1
$0.0030/GB ($3/TB), it’s about half the price of B2.
A few caveats to keep in mind:
In Duplicacy, I configured the storage as S3-compatible with MinIO (over HTTPS) as the service provider.
I don’t believe such plans are sustainable.
You want your backup to be at the profitable provider that is there for the long run, and not in the race to the bottom.
After this do you think you’ll keep using them? Being able to deposit like $10-15 in crypto and use it for a year seems fine to me (for low usage users). I do wish they would just implement api fees to deal with the problem users instead of this but whatever. The user I onboarded onto duplicacy this week seems fine just loading up some tokens so don’t have to help them with migrations which is good.
I don’t think they thought this through. Punishing users for using certain methods of payment is silly, and can be against their credit card processor merchant agreement.
And then if anyone can just pay in tokens — why bother with $5 in the first place?
And all other factors stay the same — and yet, just transaction fee is not worth $5. This makes zero sense.
Basically, I’ll just keep an eye and wait.
I think the reason they’re allowing the crypto payments is because their most avid supporters have these tokens (most of the people on the forum) but the vast vast majority of their users probably pay with card. So they know that they can avoid the backlast and reduce these “leech” accounts almost completely. Why they don’t just fix their pricing structure to make those leech users pay? I don’t know. How could a user possibly consume $160 of resources while paying $.7? Who knows. I dislike them not just being transparent and fixing the problem.