Ask HN: Would you pay for this app?
I have an idea for an app and would like feedback as to whether you would want it and how much you would pay. I basically want to make something like Dropbox where you can store your files online and they are automatically synced, but instead of storing your files on a third party's servers, store them on your own computers. You would set up the app on all the computers you want to save your files to and then you'd have a RAID-like setup where if one computer (or maybe more) is destroyed, the rest would have backups of the file. It'd work a lot like Bit Torrent.
Would you pay for something like this? How much? Good idea -- see AeroFS for a few clever people doing it already (http://www.aerofs.com). In answer to your question, I wouldn't pay for it, but don't let that discourage you as I'm almost certainly not your target user (and I would suspect many others on HN aren't either). Dropbox is free, and they're actually providing something that costs money (bandwidth and disk space in some data center holding copies of my data). Your service would use my own computers, my own bandwidth and my own disks. I wouldn't personally buy it, as I already have my own little scripts that make mirrored backups each night. If I were to find some feature of yours so compelling though, it'd be an "app store" type purchase -- $6.99 or less one-time fee. http://sparkleshare.org go help them out ;) I'm quite content with dropbox, but looking at the landscape there is a lot of potential for competitors. So go for it! If there is a lucrative untapped market for that sort of thing it might possibly be in the enterprise market, where corporations/governments are worried about both data loss and the security implications of storing stuff on others' servers (I'm assuming it syncs files and devices in ways that go above and beyond simply offering the standard option to save everything on the company's network server) Then again, it's a much harder product to build and market to enter... I use Windows Live Mesh for this. By default it replicates across your PCs and Macs, but you can configure it to sync to cloud storage as well. That sounds like what I want, maybe I can use that for myself. well, I don't pay for Dropbox and I am quite happy with how they have solved this problem so I guess to answer your question... i would not be one of your paying customers and my interest in having to setup a service on all of my machines that is anymore complicated that Dropbox would also be near 0 Good idea, i'm actually going to do this, quite useful. I don't know how you could profit from something like this though, i don't see a good reason why i should pay someone when i can do this with my own resources. I've seen something that is exactly what you describe. I can't remember the name though. Not that that should discourage you from creating this. Dropbox is one of the only services I pay for (last.fm is the other). I don't see why I would use this app, but that's just me.