Blockchain-based cloud storage service reveals pricing and launch date

Tardigrade slices up files and stores them across a constellation of hard drives around the world

A distributed cloud storage service that stores encrypted data on the spare disk space of users around the world using blockchain technology has revealed its pricing model and launch date.

Storj Labs’ Tardigrade service has been in beta for developers, businesses and consumers since August and currently has 400 active users. Today, the company has come forward with a pricing model which it claims is more economical than legacy cloud storage providers.

“The last major change in cloud storage prices came when Google entered the market, over five years ago. Since then, cloud storage prices have declined on average by less than 10 percent total, despite the retail price of storage devices dropping by 3x over the same period,” said Ben Golub, Executive Chairman, and Interim CEO at Storj Labs.

“By leveraging the power of decentralization, Storj Labs is able to offer enterprise grade performance and durability, enhanced security, and do so economically at half the price of the legacy cloud providers.”

On average, the three main cloud storage providers (AWS, Azure and GCP) charge $22 per terabyte for static storage and $99 per terabyte for bandwidth, before you take in to account extra costs for encryption and multi-zone redundancy — features Tardigrade offers as standard. Tardigrade charges $10 per terabyte per month for static storage and $45 per terabyte of download bandwidth consumed.

According to Storj Labs, Tardigrade also offers 99.97 percent availability (the system’s ability to download a file at the first attempt to do so). By comparison the uptime of Amazon’s S3 cloud service ranges from 95 to 99 percent. Tardigrade also claims similar or superior download performance compared to the major cloud storage providers and provides a money back guarantee on lost data.

Tardigrade users who rent spare storage on their hard drives earn cryptocurrency, or storage and network capacity. The service’s total storage now fluctuates between 4.3 and 7 petabytes of storage capacity, with 6PB availability planned for when it launches in January. Tardigrade offers an Amazon S3 gateway that provides compatibility with existing S3 applications.

“Since we founded Storj Labs in 2014, we’ve strived to create a decentralized cloud storage network that delivers enterprise-grade features, performance, and durability, but also harnesses the power of decentralization to enhance privacy, security, and performance for people storing data in the cloud,” said Shawn Wilkinson, Chief Strategy Officer at Storj Labs.

“It’s been a long road filled with many challenges that have never been solved before, but we’re now ready for more people to start using the network in their cloud environments. We look forward to seeing what people can build with decentralized cloud storage.”

Following the Beta 2 release, Storj Labs will accelerate the onboarding of the 14,000 users on its waiting list.