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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][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" ๐Ÿฆ–, 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! ๐Ÿ˜ฑ 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
๐Ÿ‘ฝ Zurg mounts: 152 +14
๐Ÿ’พ ElfStorage in TBs 82 +5
Tenant pods 4721 +614
๐Ÿฆธ Elf-vengers 4 -
๐Ÿง‘โ€๐ŸŽ“ Trainees 2 -
Bugz squished - -
New toyz - -

Summary

Thanks for geeking out with us, and please share these posts with related geeks!