Minimum price for a Storage SaaS subscription?
Storage SaaS providers (SSaaS) are companies which sell end users a product that requires lots of storage. Examples are backup (Mozy) and file sync (DropBox). When SSaaS get to a billion customers, their primary expense will be that of storage and that's what I focus on in this post. I suspect all SSaaS buy their storage from one of the big 3 utility computing sources (Microsoft, Amazon, Google), which all have identical pricing. As of June '12 - The utility computing price for storage is 1.25$/GB/yr for low volume and 0.6$/GB/yr for high volume. This means, that a SSaaS providers price must exceed the price of 1.25$/GB/yr to be profitable even with a smaller customer base. Lets check the pricing of some services: DropBox - 100$/50GB = 2$/GB Mozy - 60$/50GB = 1.2$GB Dropbox is profitable on storage cost out of the gate, but what about Mozy? At 1.2$/GB they would be taking a loss until they can get enough customers to qualify for storage volume discount pricin