Soonr: Are You Serious?

The past few days we saw a new Cloud based storage service called Soonr getting buzz in the Tech Blogosphere. In fact, I didn’t even get what is great about Soonr when there are many such services already existing in this space. Nevertheless, I decided to try it out and see what is so great about the service. After I set up my account and logged in, it showed me the space available for free users like me. 500 MB. Yes, you heard it right, 500 MB. For a moment, I thought I am living in the previous century. Who offers 500 MB in this era? In fact, why would anyone try this service when competing vendors offer anything from 2 GB (Dropbox) to 5 GB (Live Mesh)? I am not someone who falls for the free 50 GB (Adrive) and 1 TB (Oosah) storage offerings. I perfectly understand that computing resources costs money for the vendor and I actually appreciate those companies who charge for storage upfront. In fact, I am a happy paying customer of Sugarsync who, by the way, also offer iphone application.

Once I checked it, I tweeted my disappointment about the 500 MB storage on Twitter.

Soonr is a joke. My account is just 500 MB. Who gives 500 MB in this era?

Later I got a response from someone who appears to be part of the Soonr team. He said

First, I got a bit confused about the response and then realized that he is asking me to shut up and live with it just because it is free. This is not a way to do business. This doesn’t give me confidence that I can rely on this service to store my important data. They have got two things wrong. Offering 500 MB free is a big put-off for many people. In fact, I would have gladly tried it out if they offered only paid plans. Second, their approach to customer service, in this era of social media, is also not so encouraging.

I have already talked about storage pricing but I will emphasize once again. Cloud Storage startups should do the math in advance and announce their pricing when they open up for beta. I do agree that one of the unique advantages of SaaS and other Cloud based services is that vendors can push new features, get instant feedback and then iterate towards maturity. But it is valid only on the technology front and not on the pricing front. Users invest quite a bit of time and, in some cases, money to try out these services. Taking them for granted with price changes in between or telling them to shut up and take whatever free storage they offer is not a smart way to do business. It will definitely not enhance the confidence of consumers on SaaS and other Cloud offerings.

Krisnan, you know how to generate controversy! Calling the entire service a joke without even trying it is a bit much. I am NOT telling you to "shut up", in fact I am inviting you to find out more. This is why we made Soonr publicly available. I'll be glad to talk to you about it in any open forum. One thing to note is that we are NOT targeting media sharing. You'll notice that by default, we do not backup videos and pictures (aka SugarSync). Filter out those file types from your harddrive and see what the size of your collective documents are. Please contact me on Skype (songzunhuang) or email (song @ soonr.com - without the spaces) and we can continue on. I look forward to your response.

" Cloud Storage startups should do the math in advance and announce their pricing when they open up for beta." Agreed - I can get a 4GB USB flash drive pretty cheap (+/-$20) - what's the point? Try and buy is a great strategy, but full disclosure of pricing upfront and a limited term that can be turned into a subscription is what makes most sense. Sounds like marketing is asleep at the wheel. With so much competition in this market and increased awareness on social media - it is hard to imagine they will last.

Song, I have 20GB of documents, project files, email files. This is not counting my 500GB of pictures, music, video files. I don't even consider online storage for my use. I cerainly have Mozy Backup for online backup - and use quite a few GB. Otherwise everything else is stored on a Windows Home Server. I think people will be happy with a mix of local automated backup (Windows Home Server, Apple Time Capsule) and online backup (Mozy, Carbonite). Off site backup is a must. I know someone who has a few GB stored on Flickr as the main and only repository of his pictures. Now he's worried if Yahoo! is going to keep the service running - he doesn't have the pictures on his PC at all. Not even a backup. Bad strategy there... Online storage? Sure. Some collaboration project. But even so...

Song, Thanks for the response. I will talk to you through Skype pretty soon and see if we can have a followup. However, I still disagree with you and feel that you haven't got it right. Even without videos and pictures, my documents will go very much over 500 MB. As I told, I have no problem paying for storage. I would rather like to see Cloud storage providers get this right in the first instance. Will talk to you soon on this topic.

OK, I hear you on the storage front. We have been operating Soonr for 4 years and past data suggests that the volume of information folks like M Freitas have is way outside the median. However, I know that storage requirements are growing exponentially as prices drop and media creation accelerates. Soonr is the backend for many services that exist today. Premium offerings are offered by our partners (some with unlimited storage). One thing we didn't want to do is to have a free offering that competed with premium offerings. One of the ways to do that was to limit the storage. Another related thing that happened was the creation of our iPhone application. We've had that for months, but were holding back as we waited for some of our partners to launch. You see, there's a process to get an application through the Apple app store that we have little insight into. With MacWorld upon us, we didn't want to hold back any more because we felt that it was/is a great platform to launch. So unfortunately we can't point people to an upgrade path just yet because our partners offerings have not been made public. It's a bit frustrating. Michael Dunham made the comment above that "Marketing is asleep at the wheel", when in reality marketing made a calculated risk. We knew there would be some repercussion, but in the end, the response to the offering has been overwhelmingly positive. Another advantage of getting the service out there is that we can get immediate and direct feedback from vehicles like this blog. It's all good and one of the reasons why the web/social networking is so amazing.

Soonr: Are You Serious?

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