Thank you very much for your offer. I don't need a refund though.
Personally, I don't require transcoding since I convert all my files to 320kbps mp3 files. Even toasters support this format :)
I also add album art and metadata to each individual mp3 file.
Basically, what I need Astiga for is to index my cloud files, show me the organized library, and point each track to the the file on the cloud. The statistics part is a cool feature to have, but not essential. It's preferable that Astiga downloads the library database to my phone so that even browsing and searching is done on my phone without requiring accessing Astiga servers. This means something like CloudPlayer but without the sync process occurring on my phone, which takes a long time and I would lose everything if delete the app/format phone/change phone. I don't know how that will affect the desktop experience though.
This dropbox player is neat and is a good introductory demo.
@Agista There might be a halfway house there when, in certain cases, we are able to redirect a request for a file to the cloud storage service directly. But I haven't thought that through yet, and it would require the ability to return a signed URL so the storage service can authenticate and authorise you. All that would require support from the storage service... Thanks for making me think about that!
You clearly know nothing about cloud hosting. Do you have any recommendations for other hosts that would be cheaper so he doesn't have to raise prices? People on the internet always want free stuff and they don't understand the costs behind clod services.
For reference, we use Hetzner for hosting and Wasabi for bulk data storage - they are both pretty cheap as cloud hosting goes, but have raised their prices.
@musically Yes my own computer with tailscale (0 euros) and Jellyfin « mister not nice » not the best but it works and I know hosting I host several website on different hoster and I use Hetzner.
And don’t forget, Astiga doesn’t store your files directly. You have to buy drive space in addition of Astiga service (pcloud etc….). So perhaps more than 100 Euros per year in total with Astiga at 50 euros. So taking spotify or apple music is cheaper.
For 56 euros on hetzner per year I can have a nextcloud instance with 2to of space and lesson my music, store files, calendar, attach more space with other cloud drive, work on only office online, back up my computer….. So for the same price as Astiga I have more so for me 50 euros for services that are proposed by Astiga are not legitimate for the moment.
As I said, 25 euros per year is I think the best price for the service.
I am on the fence about the price increase. I expected it but not such a large jump.
As I am based in Australia each of the currencies offered return different values in AUD when translated, so I am seeing an annual cost going from around 40AUD up to circa 90-100AUD.
I still have around 8 months on my current subscription. So I may take advantage of the lock in and wait to see what happens with regards to the service in the coming months before making a final decision in 2024.
For the most part my experience has been positive with the Android app, it is clunky but functionable (far better than the pCloud player, which is not far off useless unless all your files are mp3). I use the app most days, so if you break it down to a daily cost, it is not much. The monthly renewal does not work for me as I would be paying extra "fees" to banks to translate each month as well as remembering to set aside funds each month.
As a matter of interest, what would potentially happen if a monthly payment was missed? Would service be cut off or throttled after a number of days ?
@Heiguer Thanks for your thoughts. If you miss a payment the payment processor retries a day or two later. If that fails then the account is suspended and you won't be able to access the service, but it can be re-activated fairly easily by just completing the purchase again. If all else fails, email me!
Well, at least you convinced me to stop waffling and sign up for a year at the current price.
I still think the old price was steep -- $25/yr gets you a year of iTunes Match which essentially includes cloud hosting for your music and crossplatform play.
But since I'd somehow already gotten lifetime pCloud, Astiga is give or take an iTunes Match equivalency for me, and Astiga has builtin last.fm support rather than via a 3rd-party app, so here we go...
I'm not super optimistic about renewing next year at the new prices. Maybe the prices will change again, but this time by going lower. 🤞
----
Changing gears...
"The latter shouldn't cost Astiga anything. I always wondered why Astiga would download the music from the cloud to its servers, then sends them my way. It makes no sense."
Yeah, I'm there too and asked about that a while back. I still don't 100% understand why so many files pass through astiga servers.
I can see having a higher tier that supports more file types via transcoding, but the stock html media player is pretty good in modern browsers now. A cheaper, "Hey, we play mp3, m4a, even FLAC for cheap and just manage your metadata" tier would suit me just fine.
That might be a great idea - price differentiation. But as I said above, we would need a way of converting your current file location to a URL that can be accessed directly.
So full disclosure, I was looking to see how difficult it'd be to write a pCloud only cloud player with last.fm support because, you know, somehow the full-time month I'd need to do it would be worth the huge savings of $25 a year (spoiler: see comic 🙄), and at least that API does give you a URL you can shove into a web player and play with streaming.
That said, I'd rather do it in Electron or something and download ahead of the game for a better experience, which I'm guessing is give or take what you're talking about -- not wanting to wait on possible buffering or anything. And that's when it firmly went past, "Could I do this as a 'weekend hack'?" territory (hat top to James Gosling and JNN for that term). But it didn't do horribly feeding right to the web player.
I still bet you could write to local storage or some other workaround, but haven't really looked (looks like local storage caps out at 5 megs total :sigh:).
I'm interested in your hack, and especially if pCloud does provide pre-signed URLs which could be used cross-session. But I kind of want to keep that subject out of this thread, so please open a new one if you want to discuss.
File transcoding has always been the big problem of Astiga for me. A cheaper service with no server transcoding would be great. Sure that resolving the file URL with no transcoding results in lighter server usage.
One thing I'd want to say is (and I won't keep going on about it after this), is that I think what some people comparing prices with iTunes and Spotify need to realize, is that Big Tech often gets discounts due to the amount of data they use (high volume of data often means getting deals where you are paying less per volume) if they don't simply have their own datacentres. And that they tend to sell under market value specifically to kill competition (Amazon being most infamous for this, but not the only one doing it), as well as being able to compensate losses from one service with the profit of others'. Even Spotify up to this day does NOT generate money and never has! Even with the latest numbers of Q4 2022, they celebrate being the first music streaming service with 200 million users but they're still ending in red numbers. It's easy to be cheaper when you don't need to earn back cost + some profit of your service. And then we're not even talking yet about the fact you pay with your data at those companies, having them track everything they can about you, while Astiga covers full cost by income only.
Yes, Astiga might cost more, but it's not a fair comparison to simply say "but iTunes is cheaper". That oversimplifies the situation way too much. A smaller company, a privacy-minded company that doesn't track your every behaviour for profit (assuming we trust gravelld in this), a company that needs to make an actual profit of this product alone, all those things will always make it cost more than a Big Tech solution. It's the same as why Proton Mail cost money while you could get a free Outlook or Gmail, the end-service might be the same but the underlying business is completely different, and that difference is why people use it. For me, the lack of commercial tracking, the ease of streaming my library of uncompressed CD rips on all my devices (also meaning no licensing issues removing music nor music I don't like cluttering my library) & having them organized the way I like, and the closeness between company and community are reason to rather pay a bit more. And I'd almost dare to say, If money is really all you're caring about in choosing your music streaming solution, Astiga might simply not be what you're looking for.
If anything, Astiga is more like a Subsonic server that connects to external storage and is hosted and maintained for you anyways, with additional clients for continuity so that stuff like playlists and ques can be automatically shared between devices and instances. And that's a different product than iTunes, Spotify, etc. to begin with. "Private Spotify" is a good simplified explanation to explain what the service offers, but a bit too limited when comparing cost and business models.
Interesting thoughts @Cambionn , it's always interesting to read how others perceive the market. Broadly speaking, I agree. I'm not really interested in competing on price, per se. Obviously there's a "sweet spot" for pricing - too high, especially for a consumer product, and you won't get any customers. And I'm sensitive to current inflationary pressures that affect pretty much all of us, worldwide. But I don't want to make a low price the reason people use Astiga, as such. We just can't compete on those terms.
Personally, I also use a paid-for email service (Fastmail) for the same reason.
It's looking like the implementation of this is going to be pushed back a few days while we make sure everything is working just right. I'll update when we decide we're going to deploy the changes.
No - the refunds are manual. Could you get in contact via email, because I can't immediately see your transaction with your email address. I found it and refunded your previous transaction, although I see you actually purchased twice - can you get in touch via email to discuss this?
Comments
@gravelld
Thank you very much for your offer. I don't need a refund though.
Personally, I don't require transcoding since I convert all my files to 320kbps mp3 files. Even toasters support this format :)
I also add album art and metadata to each individual mp3 file.
Basically, what I need Astiga for is to index my cloud files, show me the organized library, and point each track to the the file on the cloud. The statistics part is a cool feature to have, but not essential. It's preferable that Astiga downloads the library database to my phone so that even browsing and searching is done on my phone without requiring accessing Astiga servers. This means something like CloudPlayer but without the sync process occurring on my phone, which takes a long time and I would lose everything if delete the app/format phone/change phone. I don't know how that will affect the desktop experience though.
This dropbox player is neat and is a good introductory demo.
@Agista There might be a halfway house there when, in certain cases, we are able to redirect a request for a file to the cloud storage service directly. But I haven't thought that through yet, and it would require the ability to return a signed URL so the storage service can authenticate and authorise you. All that would require support from the storage service... Thanks for making me think about that!
@buppi Waiting by my inbox...
You clearly know nothing about cloud hosting. Do you have any recommendations for other hosts that would be cheaper so he doesn't have to raise prices? People on the internet always want free stuff and they don't understand the costs behind clod services.
Guys, let's keep it civil 🙂
For reference, we use Hetzner for hosting and Wasabi for bulk data storage - they are both pretty cheap as cloud hosting goes, but have raised their prices.
@musically Yes my own computer with tailscale (0 euros) and Jellyfin « mister not nice » not the best but it works and I know hosting I host several website on different hoster and I use Hetzner.
And don’t forget, Astiga doesn’t store your files directly. You have to buy drive space in addition of Astiga service (pcloud etc….). So perhaps more than 100 Euros per year in total with Astiga at 50 euros. So taking spotify or apple music is cheaper.
For 56 euros on hetzner per year I can have a nextcloud instance with 2to of space and lesson my music, store files, calendar, attach more space with other cloud drive, work on only office online, back up my computer….. So for the same price as Astiga I have more so for me 50 euros for services that are proposed by Astiga are not legitimate for the moment.
As I said, 25 euros per year is I think the best price for the service.
I am on the fence about the price increase. I expected it but not such a large jump.
As I am based in Australia each of the currencies offered return different values in AUD when translated, so I am seeing an annual cost going from around 40AUD up to circa 90-100AUD.
I still have around 8 months on my current subscription. So I may take advantage of the lock in and wait to see what happens with regards to the service in the coming months before making a final decision in 2024.
For the most part my experience has been positive with the Android app, it is clunky but functionable (far better than the pCloud player, which is not far off useless unless all your files are mp3). I use the app most days, so if you break it down to a daily cost, it is not much. The monthly renewal does not work for me as I would be paying extra "fees" to banks to translate each month as well as remembering to set aside funds each month.
As a matter of interest, what would potentially happen if a monthly payment was missed? Would service be cut off or throttled after a number of days ?
@Heiguer Thanks for your thoughts. If you miss a payment the payment processor retries a day or two later. If that fails then the account is suspended and you won't be able to access the service, but it can be re-activated fairly easily by just completing the purchase again. If all else fails, email me!
Well, at least you convinced me to stop waffling and sign up for a year at the current price.
I still think the old price was steep -- $25/yr gets you a year of iTunes Match which essentially includes cloud hosting for your music and crossplatform play.
But since I'd somehow already gotten lifetime pCloud, Astiga is give or take an iTunes Match equivalency for me, and Astiga has builtin last.fm support rather than via a 3rd-party app, so here we go...
I'm not super optimistic about renewing next year at the new prices. Maybe the prices will change again, but this time by going lower. 🤞
----
Changing gears...
"The latter shouldn't cost Astiga anything. I always wondered why Astiga would download the music from the cloud to its servers, then sends them my way. It makes no sense."
Yeah, I'm there too and asked about that a while back. I still don't 100% understand why so many files pass through astiga servers.
I can see having a higher tier that supports more file types via transcoding, but the stock html media player is pretty good in modern browsers now. A cheaper, "Hey, we play mp3, m4a, even FLAC for cheap and just manage your metadata" tier would suit me just fine.
That might be a great idea - price differentiation. But as I said above, we would need a way of converting your current file location to a URL that can be accessed directly.
So full disclosure, I was looking to see how difficult it'd be to write a pCloud only cloud player with last.fm support because, you know, somehow the full-time month I'd need to do it would be worth the huge savings of $25 a year (spoiler: see comic 🙄), and at least that API does give you a URL you can shove into a web player and play with streaming.
That said, I'd rather do it in Electron or something and download ahead of the game for a better experience, which I'm guessing is give or take what you're talking about -- not wanting to wait on possible buffering or anything. And that's when it firmly went past, "Could I do this as a 'weekend hack'?" territory (hat top to James Gosling and JNN for that term). But it didn't do horribly feeding right to the web player.
I still bet you could write to local storage or some other workaround, but haven't really looked (looks like local storage caps out at 5 megs total :sigh:).
I'm interested in your hack, and especially if pCloud does provide pre-signed URLs which could be used cross-session. But I kind of want to keep that subject out of this thread, so please open a new one if you want to discuss.
File transcoding has always been the big problem of Astiga for me. A cheaper service with no server transcoding would be great. Sure that resolving the file URL with no transcoding results in lighter server usage.
One thing I'd want to say is (and I won't keep going on about it after this), is that I think what some people comparing prices with iTunes and Spotify need to realize, is that Big Tech often gets discounts due to the amount of data they use (high volume of data often means getting deals where you are paying less per volume) if they don't simply have their own datacentres. And that they tend to sell under market value specifically to kill competition (Amazon being most infamous for this, but not the only one doing it), as well as being able to compensate losses from one service with the profit of others'. Even Spotify up to this day does NOT generate money and never has! Even with the latest numbers of Q4 2022, they celebrate being the first music streaming service with 200 million users but they're still ending in red numbers. It's easy to be cheaper when you don't need to earn back cost + some profit of your service. And then we're not even talking yet about the fact you pay with your data at those companies, having them track everything they can about you, while Astiga covers full cost by income only.
Yes, Astiga might cost more, but it's not a fair comparison to simply say "but iTunes is cheaper". That oversimplifies the situation way too much. A smaller company, a privacy-minded company that doesn't track your every behaviour for profit (assuming we trust gravelld in this), a company that needs to make an actual profit of this product alone, all those things will always make it cost more than a Big Tech solution. It's the same as why Proton Mail cost money while you could get a free Outlook or Gmail, the end-service might be the same but the underlying business is completely different, and that difference is why people use it. For me, the lack of commercial tracking, the ease of streaming my library of uncompressed CD rips on all my devices (also meaning no licensing issues removing music nor music I don't like cluttering my library) & having them organized the way I like, and the closeness between company and community are reason to rather pay a bit more. And I'd almost dare to say, If money is really all you're caring about in choosing your music streaming solution, Astiga might simply not be what you're looking for.
If anything, Astiga is more like a Subsonic server that connects to external storage and is hosted and maintained for you anyways, with additional clients for continuity so that stuff like playlists and ques can be automatically shared between devices and instances. And that's a different product than iTunes, Spotify, etc. to begin with. "Private Spotify" is a good simplified explanation to explain what the service offers, but a bit too limited when comparing cost and business models.
Interesting thoughts @Cambionn , it's always interesting to read how others perceive the market. Broadly speaking, I agree. I'm not really interested in competing on price, per se. Obviously there's a "sweet spot" for pricing - too high, especially for a consumer product, and you won't get any customers. And I'm sensitive to current inflationary pressures that affect pretty much all of us, worldwide. But I don't want to make a low price the reason people use Astiga, as such. We just can't compete on those terms.
Personally, I also use a paid-for email service (Fastmail) for the same reason.
It's looking like the implementation of this is going to be pushed back a few days while we make sure everything is working just right. I'll update when we decide we're going to deploy the changes.
Edit: it's deployed now.
Would this explain the lack of refund also? I've already made the payment to lock in the prices but already had more than 1 year worth paid up front.
No - the refunds are manual.
Could you get in contact via email, because I can't immediately see your transaction with your email address.I found it and refunded your previous transaction, although I see you actually purchased twice - can you get in touch via email to discuss this?