We all like free things. Free can be hard to pass up.
However, sometimes “free” has a cost, and often that cost is you. Andrew Lewis, an Irish-born American pioneer, once said, “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” Perhaps the things that are seemingly free are in reality traded for our attention or a deeper understanding of our behaviors. Maybe that’s not truly free after all.
There are many obvious examples of this. A television show is free entertainment broadcast with the hope that you’ll not only enjoy the show but also watch the ads. Bulk grocery stores hand out free food with the hope that more non-free products end up in your shopping cart. And we’ve all heard of attractive free vacation deals that seem too good to be true. Before you know it, your free vacation has, at best, turned into a stressful sales pitch for something you probably don’t want, or, at worst, an expensive timeshare ownership. The list goes on.
With our increasingly digital lives, “free” now has the potential to cost even more. Our online lives are becoming easier to track. The sites we visit, the things we “like,” the comments we post, the people we tag, the things we search for, the files we store, and the locations we visit are all trackable information used in different ways. This is important because understanding our behaviors is extremely valuable. Understanding our personal preferences — and in some cases, our subconscious preferences — allows people to influence our decisions and position products and services to us in a way that makes us more likely to purchase them. Understanding customers has always been the key to selling anything to anyone. Previously, the existing information was small, unconnected fragments that made it hard to have a complete customer picture. Now, a complete personal profile data set is possible by collating our thousands of small digital interactions. Certainly, this type of information can provide tremendous benefits for us. For instance, we might receive alerts about heavy traffic affecting our commute, about that friend who’s nearby, or about that reminder to pick something up when we leave our house. This “full picture” of us is also very valuable to people trying to sell us things.
Personal information tracking for advertising purposes has been well-reported and is the catalyst for many public policy debates and government legislation. Yet, the tracking sophistication grows each year, and each year we get more accustomed to receiving free services. Our appetite for free things means that we’ll become more tolerant of trading our most personal information away. How tolerant we become about our personal information becomes a key concern. When does personal information tracking cross the line?
This is an exceptionally important question when you’re in the business of providing the world’s best personal storage experience.
Upthere was designed to replace your hard drive, not act as a replica or “sync’ed” copy of it. We envision a future where your data lives exclusively in the cloud and is available to you whenever and wherever you want. This implies that we’re storing your most personal files. In reality, this is true for any personal cloud storage option, whether or not you use Upthere. When you use personal cloud storage, you’re almost always storing content that’s extremely personal to you: tax documents, pictures of your children, your favorite music, videos from your memorable honeymoon, and so on. The data you store is a snapshot of your life. At Upthere, we believe that this data is exclusive to you and those you choose to share your content with. Our service is the actual product, and you’re the real customer — not the other way around.
This is why we charge for our product. We don’t “monetize” you and your personal information. We monetize our own product. We understand your content belongs to you and you only.
This was a hard decision because it’s counter to what many other providers have chosen to do. People often ask, “Isn’t personal cloud storage free?” In many cases, the answer is yes. But we need to consider practical realities. When you store information in the cloud, that data lives on hard drives that live inside of computers that live inside of data centers that are accessed over networks. All of this costs real money. When someone is offering you “free” cloud storage, they also need to pay for all those real resources. If it’s free, how do they pay for everything? If you’re not paying for the product, are you truly the customer? Most likely, you’re not.
As we evolve our pricing — as all companies do — we’ll stay committed to our core values. The things you store in Upthere are yours, period. We will not ask you, our customers, to trade away your information for something “free.” If and when we offer things for free, it will be because we feel that we can provide real value while still balancing the cost realities of providing the world’s best personal storage experience.
___
Kai Gray
VP, Operations
