Wownce

On Pownce you are either spiffy or are supa-spiffy. They have pro account available. The Pro makes you a supa-spiffy guy, gal, gentleman, chicky-poo, and so on. So is it worth $20 a year? Well here’s how Pownce describes it..

Go Pro!

• Send files up to 100 MB
• Design a custom theme
• No advertisements
• Only 20 bucks a year

I personally think it’s a great deal! I just haven’t sailed my ship into “Pro” haven quite yet. So why don’t I break down one aspect of what actually goes into the Pro pricing.

Amazon S3 Prices for storage. (This is the service Pownce uses to store all your rubbish.)

So lets say this nice, young, video loving gentleman gets himself a snazzy Pro account. He uploads about one 100Mb file per week to share with his fellow crazies. So lets do the math: 1024Mb = One Gigabyte, 100Mb x 52 weeks = 5200Mb, 5200Mb/1024 = about 5.09Gb, 5.09Gb x $0.15 = about $0.76. Now he might say “Oh well that’s not too much!”, but I think I forgot to mention how much S3 charges for data transfer. Amazon S3 charges $0.10Gb for all transfer in. So lets do that math: 5.09Gb x $0.10 = about $0.51. So lets add those up: $1.27. So he’s still wondering why so much? Well lets say this young man is a popular Powncester who has about… lets say 300 pals, and better yet he has 500 fans! So lets munch on this.. Pownce, since they have about 200,000 users or so, uses well over 50Tb (that’s 1024Gb x 50 for all you non-storage nerds) of downstream transfer; So that means S3 charges them $0.13 per gigabyte transfered. So lets now the real math starts. Just for sake of reason, lets say of the 800 people that get his file, 150 download it:

( [ {150 downloads x 100Mb} / 1024  ] x $0.13) = $1.90

So that’s $1.90 per for his 100Mb file. So lets multiply that by the 52 weeks for which he releases a 100Mb file.

$1.90 x 52 = $98.80

So just that right there makes the Pro account worth every penny, but we for got that extra $1.27 he costed Pownce. So in all reality this guy would cost them around $100.07 in bandwidth, storage, and data transfers. That means that this fellow, and anyone else, could possibly pay damn close to 1/4th the price that Pownce is charged. Plus you the ability to design your own templates (totally awesome by the way!) and you get no ads! It really is a steal! (Oh and you get the little “Pro” thingy in the corner of you picture too!)

Now I realize that I used the largest possible file size, etc; but I was just trying to make a statistical point here. With all that I know about Pownce they’re NOT trying to one thing, and that is to screw you over like a stallion with a hard-on.

Pownce, keep up the good work.

(Sources: Amazon Web Services, Pownce, Pownce: About)