Price rebalancing planned for 1 April 2024
As previously announced, we're be doing the first of what will become routine price-rebalancing, starting on 1 April 2024. This is the first time we've adjusted prices since we were "born" in June of 2023, and so this process may be a little jarring / unpolished at first!
TL;DR - How will this affect me?
There will be no change to the price of existing, active subscriptions. New prices will apply to new subscriptions.
However.. where there's a significant difference between existing and new pricing, we may reduce resource allocations on existing subscriptions proportionately. (for example, the existing Plex pricing only covers about 30% of actual expenses) - I'm seeking community feedback on how to proceed here.
I've laid out our transparent pricing process and costs in detail, and the stated goal is:
At the highest level, our goal is to recover hardware costs equivalent to resources consumed, and to realize 20% profit on costs (see how we're going on this goal by examining our monthly reports!)
Read below for details on app-specific changes..
Upcoming pricing changes
After reviewing the actual usage data as described here, the following price changes will be effected as of April 1 2024:
| App | Current Price | New Price |
|---|---|---|
| "Exposed" apps | $0.05 | FREE |
| Custom domains | $0.05 | FREE |
| ElfStorage (per TB) | $0.20 | $0.10 |
| Remote debrid mounts (Zurg, AllDebrid, PutIO, etc) | $0.05 | $0.20 |
| Plex | $0.15 | $0.50 |
| Jellyfin | $0.15 | $0.50 |
| Emby | $0.15 | $0.50 |
| Radarr | $0.05 | $0.20 |
| Sonarr | $0.05 | $0.20 |
| qBittorrent | $0.15 | $0.30 |
| Deluge | $0.15 | $0.30 |
| ruTorrent | $0.15 | $0.30 |
| SABnzbd | $0.15 | $0.30 |
| NZBGet | $0.15 | $0.30 |
| Other $0.05 apps | $0.05 | $0.10 |
Why the massive jump in streamers / Aars?
When the current pricing was set in June 2023, we didn't have "infinite streaming" from debrid providers with symlinks, and so it was a "simpler time"..
With the current symlink design, it's possible to import huge libraries (upwards of 50TB!) within a few hours, which has a significant resource implication, especially for storage I/O related to metadata and databases!
There's an obvious trend here - when users have the choice, local storage and "traditional" seedboxing are "fading away" 
, and the debrid-based "infinite streaming" options are becoming more popular.
The other obvious trend is that everything except ElfStorage has become at least 100% more expensive! 
The primary reason for this has to do with cluster overheads - there's a minimum amount of overhead required to maintain a stable and secure cluster, so even apps with a very small footprint (such as PrivateBin) incur some measure of cluster / management overhead.
Plex_debrid refreshed (in beta)
Our xterm-in-VNC-in-a-browser plex_debrid implementation works, but it's a PITA, and creates a disproportionate amount of support requests. I've refactored the app into a terminal-in-a-browser (can't escape the fact that it's an interactive CLI UI!), which is much quicker to manage, and responds better to copy/paste.
I'm also working on an improved bootstrapping process, by providing a pre-configured settings.json, and walking the user through making the minimum required changes (usually a Plex token and a RealDebrid API key). Since it's still a bit of a nuisance to get your head around, I've also got grand designs (which may not materialize!) on creating a basic video HOWTO of the whole "infinite streaming" setup. (If you've got experience / interest in the area of screencasts / video, LMK!)
Here's what the refreshed plex_debrid looks like:
Currently the updated plex_debrid is available to beta-testers, and will roll out to the stable channel after the pricing changes kick in on 1 April (don't want to attract a bunch more users just to "bait-and-switch" them with a price rebalance!)
Today's scoreboard
| Metric | Numberz | Delta |
|---|---|---|
| Total subscribers | 388 | +4 |
 Zurg mounts: | 152 | +14 |
 ElfStorage in TBs | 82 | +5 |
| Tenant pods | 4721 | +614 |
 Elf-vengers | 4 | - |
 Trainees | 2 | - |
| Bugz squished | - | - |
| New toyz | - | - |
Summary
Thanks for geeking out with us, and please share these posts with related geeks!