It feels to me that there are two distinct markets here, one for data that is being used temporarily but for an unknown duration, and a second for archival data. Two markets, two price-points.
AWS is a good indicator for the first market, but maybe not for the second? To use myself as an example, data that I want to store permanently goes onto an SSD, not the cloud. For some it might be a RAID storage system (with regular HD’s) - the latter being cheaper, but requiring more technical skill and maintenance. As we hope for Safe to be easy for grandma and not technical to use and as it will require no maintenance I feel that the SSD comparison is the best …
So, current SSD cost/GB that I just checked on ebay is now ~0.14c/GB (for a 1TB Samsung drive).
As Safe intends to serve the latter market, IMO, that’s a better metric. I didn’t include the cost of a computer, but I think using an SSD or the cloud would both require a computer/device we can exclude that from the calculation.
Yes. Even if only six months worth of cloud time we are at 12c/GB which is close to the cost of the SSD storage, but 6mo., versus lifetime of SSD (a decade or possibly more if only archival use and drive is good quality and stored well).
Edit: and in a decade when that SSD is replaced, the cost/GB will maybe be a tenth of that - thinking in terms of a Safe farmer … 12c/GB + 0.012c/GB + 0.0012c/GB infinite series … we are coming to a number around 14c/GB - real hard permanent storage cost. But this assumes we start the calculation today, and not in two years or so when Safe begins to take off … at which point starting cost may drop significantly.
Of course if the world hyperinflates, then all bets are off.