Risky idea of the week: Alternative iCloud+
Just put out the latest edition of my unvalidated ideas newsletter, and here's a particularly risky idea that was in it:
Alternative iCloud with Samba3
If you have more than 5GB of files on iCloud, you need iCloud+. iCloud+ costs $0.99 for 50GB, $2.99 for 200GB and and 2TB for $9.99. To be fair, these are pretty reasonable prices and you can share with up to 5 other family members.
In sweaty nerd land, there's a technology called Samba (usually "smb" or "samba3") that allows you to share storage with various devices. Samba matters outside sweaty nerd land because the iOS Files app supports Samba connections natively.
You probably know where I'm going with this, and I know what you're thinking -- this is a terrible idea. It's got all the hallmarks of a terrible idea. You'd have to:
- Get users to trust you more than they trust Apple (this is probably not going to happen)
- Educate users on your product as an alternative to iCloud (this is hard)
- Compete on the basis of price (many smart entrepreneurs hate doing this, it's usually a bad idea)
- Make it easy for the end-user to do something very technical -- installing a Samba share to the Files app (this is hard)
- Compete in an absolute sea of strong competitors like Google drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc.
To the average person, "Samba" is either a dance or Mufasa's son. BUT, as stupid as this idea is, the numbers work out. The numbers do work out.
Let's pretend this isn't a terrible idea for a little bit.
Cheap "retail" object storage providers like Backblaze and Wasabi charge $5 to $5.99 USD for 1TB of storage. Most people don't need terabytes, so let's compare at the GB scale:
- iCloud 2TB Storage - $0.00499/GB
- Backblaze - $0.005/GB
- Wasabi - $0.00599/GB
- iCloud 200GB Storage - $0.014/GB
- iCloud 50GB Storage - $0.019/GB
Backblaze and Wasabi are close to 1/4th the price of the 50GB iCloud+ plan, 1/3rd the price of the 200GB plan, and roughly 1/5th more expensive than the 2TB plan. You could charge half of Apple's prices and still make some profit for 2/3 of those plans.
If this could ever work you'd need:
- "Native" Files app integration (luring people who don't want yet-another app to manage)
- Good marketing for pay as you go storage for cheaper than Apple can offer (what if I only have 1 extra GB?)
- Great marketing for users who store more than 2TB (or 4TB if you pay for Apple One)
Are these compelling value propositions? I think they might be. The next question is going out and finding these users (if they exist). This is definitely a validate-before-build kind of idea -- you probably want quite the deep wait list before embarking on this hard-mode startup.
NOTE You might have noticed that I've ignored the other features of iCloud+ which are also very useful (iCloud private relay, etc). I can't say I have a solution for it other than clearly the storage being the real draw of iCloud+.
I really meant it when I say this idea is terrible... But remember those numbers? Remember how well they work out?
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