Fluxiom, based in Vienna, is a first rate online storage and file management product. I’d even go so far as to say that it is the most usable storage product I’ve tested.
A key issue with online storage is the uploading function. Typically files are uploaded one at a time via a web interface, which is fine for just a file or two but breaks down under heavy usage. Flickr and some other sites have mitigated this problem by creating a desktop-based application that users can drag multiple files into. Sites that don’t have this are seriously limited in their ability to serve customers. Fluxiom has come up with a unique way to deal with the issue without a desktop uploader - by allowing users to zip up files and upload them all in one go. While this works in theory, and I was able to upload a zipped folder with multiple files, Fluxiom did not automatically unzip the folder and I could not determine a way to do it with the service.
Fluxiom in general handles files extremely well. Uploaded files can be viewed by thumbnail or file name. Thumbnails can be resized with an Ajax slider (gimmicky but cool). Sharing, versioning and other features are all supported, as is tagging in a limited form (you must predefine tags beforehand, they cannot be created on the fly when uploading files. Fluxiom’s search is also very good.
So, on the product side, I have no complaints other than the issues I had with uploading zipped folders, and the desire to tag-on-the-fly.
On to Pricing.
Fluxiom is smoking something if they think they can mass market their product with no free version and minimum pricing of 9 Euros (about $11.21) per month for just 200 MB of storage. And while they offer a 30 day free trial for all accounts, they require a credit card to open an account. If you don’t terminate before the end of the free trial, your card is automatically charged.
Pricing for online storage has effectively been benchmarked by Amazon’s S3 - $0.15/month/GB of storage and $0.20/GB transferred. At those much more reasonable prices, Fluxiom’s 200 MB product should cost $0.03 per month (plus a bit for bandwidth), not 9 Euros. To look at this another way, Fluxiom’s pricing is 373 times what Amazon would charge for the same storage. Yes, Fluxiom has built a nice interface on top of their storage service, but this pricing is flat out outrageous.
So, Fluxiom is a great product but the team needs to seriously reconsider pricing if they want to compete in the already crowded online storage market. See Solution Watch, Pete Cashmore and Orli Yakuel for more.
Note: If you’d like to test an account, you can enter 4111111111111111 as a credit card number (at least until they disable it).
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Since its launch, I’ve been thinking the similar things about this service. Although the interface is wonderful, it will be a challange for these guys to compete, especially with the price level and marketing that other companies such as box.net have been maintaining. This is not even mentioning the heavy competition that will arise from Microsoft and Google, in the near future.
“Fluxiom has come up with a unique way to deal with the issue without a desktop uploader - by allowing users to zip up files and upload them all in one go.”
Um, Strongspace has had that ability for quite a while.
It’s silly to use Amazon’s pricing for S3 to determine a reasonable price for Fluxiom. The applications are so different that your comparison is worthless. Sure, they both involve transferring data over the Internet, as well as storing data on their servers, but the same could be said of practically any online service.
I, for one, find the Fluxiom pricing to be quite reasonable. And I think that their 30-day trial is perfect. This isn’t the sort of application that they want to give away for free. It’s a premium service for high-end customers. It’s not aimed at the mass, “consumer” market.
I think the credit card manipulation being used by this company and others like 37 Signals is a big problem for these web 2.0 services - I signed up for the free version of base camp, upgraded to the paid version to test some of the features out, and determined that it wouldn’t meet my needs, then found out that I wasn’t able to get a refund because I “upgraded” from a free account instead of starting over again.
As long as companies like 37 Signals and this company continue these manipulative charging practices, I won’t be using any paid-for web 2.0 apps anytime soon.
Grda- you may very well be right. The market will of course decide.
Andrewt - I don’t know about the issue with 37 Signals, but I have no reason to think that Fluxiom will engage in any kind of credit card shenanigans. They’re pretty up front about the way they charge.
I agree with Michael. The pricing is rediculous.
Good post. Yeah, that pricing is pretty crazy. There’s a lot of online storage places out there but no one is doin it for me yet and I’m craving it bad. Oh, and you forgot to help us out with bigger screen shots.
Yeah, I gave it a spin last week and came to the same conclusions: sweet, but way overpriced. I expect you’re probably half-kidding with the S3 comparisons - considering the value add they offer, Basecamp pricing would be more reasonable.
Pete - I missed your post, just added a link above. Looks like we came to the same conclusion on pricing.
No, not joking on the amazon comparison. Maybe they can’t make a business out of pricing that is, say 100 times lower than they currently charge, but then they should consider either not getting into the business, or upping the storage limits significantly. And providing a free account. If they have cost issues, they can just switch to S3 on the back end.
Andrewt: I’m not sure I understand your problem with Basecamp. You upgraded to a paid account with the knowledge that you would be charged for the upgrade. Basecamp allows you to downgrade back to the free account if you want, but you’re still going to get charged for the period when you had a paid account. How is this unclear? There’s no manipulation involved at all.
Upgrade to the paid plan, enter your credit card info, get charged for it. Simple and straighforward.
As far as Fluxiom is concerned I’m extremely suprised there’s no ‘free’ account available. You’d think they’d follow 37s lead. I’m not going to enter my CC info just to test something.
I agree that the pricing is a bit steep, but also with Grda that S3 is not a sensible comparison.
It’s dangerous to say that S3 has set a benchmark for online storage - it’s like using the cost of cabbage per head from a 10,000 acre farm in Nebraska as a benchmark for what Whole Foods would charge. They’re completely different places on the economic food chain.
And, Andrewt, there is no manipulation going on with either of these companies. Read what you’re getting into before you sign up, and recognize that if you have to give a credit card to use the service, it’s for a reason.
Michael, you should trade them a copy of 37Signals’ book “Getting Real Book” for some stock options. Maybe then they will realize the advantages of tiered pricing system with the first tier being free.
For once I agree with Michael.
I actually signed up for the trial cause I was excited about the interface, but actually beyond some nice icons (probably copied from the Mac X), its not fast (actually quite slow), its not terribly user friendly, and doesn’t offer much. Actually its lacking many features.
And then the crazy price! You can get two dedicated servers with 120GB of raid storage from godaddy for what these guys charge for the 8GB plan.
Some idiot will probably pay, but these guys must think they are selling perfume and that people will pay 100x the industry price for a few cool looking icons and some AJAX.
Now I just hope my card won’t get charged now that I cancelled it.
Am I missing something? Why the huge rush to online storage? I just don’t get it.
As I see it, the key value propositions that most of these online storage delivers are:
- Offsite Backup
- Remote Access of Data
- File sharing
- Simple manipulation & consumption of the files (i.e. preview images, indexed file searching, etc)
Did I miss anything important?
If the above were the only key reasons, than most of these storage services are totally missing the mark. Let me explain.
Offsite Backup - If they wanted to deliver on “Offsite Backup” they should look at my hard drive, look at what has changed and upload the new/updated files automatically without me thinking about it (preferably when my net connection is idle). Also, if I were to use it as a backup solution, I am assuming that I’ll be able to get it quickly. I haven’t seen a solution that made it easy to download a lot of files. The image I have in my head is the AllTunes application, which acts as a download manager, letting me make sense of what’s happening.
Remote Access of Data – Is this really a huge need for most people, especially considering the process of getting the file up there in the first place? I mean, if I have to click 5 or 6 times to upload a file, I might as well email the file to myself. The scenario that it would be useful is if I have a huge file that won’t fit through the inbox. In these cases, I usually need to have quick access to the file to make a quick change or two. Again, a download manager type app would actually make it useful. I can imagine an “edit” button that when clicked downloads the file and opens it up and has a “done” button that I press when I’ve finished making the changes to upload the updated file. I don’t think this is/will be a big demand for most people especially considering the cheap prices of USB memory sticks (2GB for under $80 on google - apr 26th 2006).
File Sharing – Currently, online storage is not a good way to handle file sharing unless it includes collaboration capabilities. Why? Most of these solutions don’t give a quick way to download lots of files easily. In my experience, file sharing is often done on a mass scale (10+) not a 1 or 2 file exchange.
Simple manipulation & consumption of the files – Generalized online storage companies that try to incorporate this will not be able to win over the hearts of its users. Unless they become specialized like Flickr or YouTube, the simple manipulation won’t be a “big deal.” People have developed a baseline expectations while using desktop apps like Word and will refuse to use anything that doesn’t deliver a quality user experience for that app. This means integrate Writely (or something similar) into your app or your simple editing features because a “who cares”. Make it useful or don’t make it at all.
Online storage as a theory is powerful and can & probably will change how we use computers forever. Existing solutions however just don’t have a place in tomorrow’s marketplace. Who does? Microsoft, Google and specialized services like Flickr (companies that deliver an experience for a particular need that Microsoft & Google will not be able to deliver.)
Enlighten me if I have missed anything major regarding the online storage market.
~ Mel
Michael, I wouldn’t classify Fluxion as Onlien Storage at all. They’re really a digital content manager for small businesses and Marketing departments. Why? Among opther things, they allow versioning. All their literature points towards using digital content. Therefore, I think their pricing is actually very very cheap.
This is not an application for individuals (in my mind). This is for companies. Therefore, the value proposition is different and much stronger.
I thought the same when I saw this product too. I’d actually be more interested in just paying for a simple service with a server in my country (due to low latency) that has affordable storage pricing.
“As long as companies like 37 Signals and this company continue these manipulative charging practices, I won’t be using any paid-for web 2.0 apps anytime soon.”
Manipulative? We’re completely up front about how we charge. In fact, we highlight details in bold and in yellow to make sure everything is clear. There’s no fine print, no hidden fees, nothing.
In fact, when you upgrade from a free plan (which is free for life, not just free for 30 days), we show you a checkbox which clearly states the following:
“I understand that upgrading from a free to a paying plan ends my free trial. Once I click the “Upgrade my account” button below I’ll be charged for my first month. I’ll continue to be billed every month until I cancel the service (at which point I won’t be charged again).”
it’s all right there in the open.
Fluxiom may not have the most affordable and economical pricing structure, but it has an incredible interface and other features. I agree as the consumer, I should not have to pay for a nice interface, but Fluxiom is more than simple online file storage.
These guys are blurring the gap between the desktop and a web app.
On the other hand, I don’t want to enter my credit card information just for a trial as I attempt to limit online transactions to the essentials.
This “snippet” of a so-called review is totally unfounded. As if they can’t adjust the pricing in the future.
quote: “Thumbnails can be resized with an Ajax slider (gimmicky but cool).”
If I remember correctly, EDGEIO had some slider in the sidebar to filter results a couple of iterations ago.
Innovate, don’t hate.
I used the 4111111111111111 credit card number Michael provided, made up a CVV number (clicked on VISA card) and made up a name and expiration date. Bam, I got a free trial, no need to enter any real information. I’m testing it out, but I can’t seem to enter any actual tags. I see a tags feature but can’t tag my stuff. Am I missing something. I’m using firefox on OS X.
I couldn’t agree more. The product looks great, but pricing definitely needs to be reconsidered if they want to stay around for a while.
Mike, can you think of any examples of future services yet to be built on top of Amazon’s S3 that should charge more than $0.15/month/GB of storage and $0.20/GB transferred?
If not, what’s the point of putting any work into intuitive UI / value-add features / innovative services?
# 19 - I don’t hate the company, I love innovation and my review didn’t in my opinion rip on them too much other than pricing, which is, in fact, ridiculous.
#22 - yeah, fluxiom should charge more than amazon’s wholesale price. They should charge as much as they possibly can and maximize profits. At some point people start to choke. I choked on their pricing.
I’ve tried out Fluxiom - nice interface with some snazzy features but I’m not sure I’ll keep subscribing as the USP of digital assests management isn’t really something which I require.
I also ran in to trouble uploading a zip archive. My understanding was that the service would extract the zip archive and add the individual images in to the asset library, but instead just a big zip icon sits there with which I can do nothing - the funny thing is when I click on the details button for the zip archive it even tells me how many items are inside the archive!
On the zip upload: You’ve to check the “Extract files” checkbox when you selected a zip file for uploading. This is to make sure that you don’t accidentally unzip stuff that you don’t want to have unzipped. Here’s the blog entry for this: http://blog.fluxiom.com/2006/4.....p-archives — we’ve also added nice friendly green letters to that now, so it’s easier to see.
The point that everyone seems to miss is that fluxiom isn’t so much about gigabytes and gigabytes of storage space. It’s about finding the stuff you need quickly and efficiently, and to be able to share that. fluxiom is for people who don’t care and DON’T WANT to care about dedicated servers, or crappy interfaces, or acronyms like SFTP/SCP/FTP/WebDAV, or “you need the new beta of the FTP client for it to work”, or “I can’t open these Outlook attachments” or what-have-you.
It’s for people that want a tool that works for them, in a great way.
I agree 100% on the ridiculous pricing. It’s pretty crazy and was the first thing I noticed.
And what is with the no free trial? If they can’t offer the 200MB on a 30 day trial or something (without credit card, can’t they even offer a 10MB account or something to play with?
Technically the service may be great but their business aspect sucks.
I’m using Box.Net (www.box.net) and I find it very good. It also accepts zip files uploads.
What is so great about all of this?
Uploading is still the #1 annoying factor in the whole storage business. Everything work fine, if you want to upload some 1MB tiny nonsense files. But what about really fat files >> 100MB? We have more and more of that stuff.
Let’s say you start an upload. Then 35 minutes later, you want to leave the office with your notebook, which does the upload. Are those 35 minutes and all those MBs down the drain?
Or you can resume it?
A download feature, that can not handle things like network disconnect, computer crash or the users will to pause the upload are just trash.
Take a look at what the P2P guys do. Huge uploads work just fine. No problem with all those technical stuff around it.
What makes a good car? Nice and shiny colour or a good engine and transmission? Think about it!
It’s silly to compare prices with these of Amazon S3. Correct me if I’m wrong but at the time of writing there is simply no service at all that actually uses Amazon S3! And it’s not because Amazon S3 is so cheap that every application should use it. Not everyone trusts Amazon and especially if you’re gonna store corporate information you want a more indepent and preferably non-American service to store your files. I’ve been talking with quite some CEO’s about online storage and none of them plan to use Amazon S3 or Gdrive in the future. Simply because it’s American and because they have different privacy policies.
The http://www.PBase.com photo service has allowed uploading of multiple photos in one zip for years now. Just thought I’d mention that.
““Fluxiom has come up with a unique way to deal with the issue without a desktop uploader - by allowing users to zip up files and upload them all in one go.”
Um, Strongspace has had that ability for quite a while. ”
And so has Storegate.
This guy gets payed to promote some and ignore others? This is some funny CRAP.
11 Euros is too much for a service that you would trust your files to? Are you serious? How exactly do you expect these companies to operate if you find 11 Euros outrageous for such an important service?
Comparing it to Amazon is like comparing going down to the fisherman at the wharf and purchasing your fish as opposed to going to a restaurant where the fish is prepared for you. Most users can’t use Amazon’s service and Amazon has not designed their service to be used by anyone other than developers who will then mark up the pricing based on the value add they bring to the party.
Your comments are far too “2000ish.” I would have thought everyone learned the lesson that you can’t have wonderful online services for free. When comparing a service such as Fluxium to other cheaper services, you have to ask yourself how wonderful those cheaper services are if their business model won’t allow them to be around in three years. Just because its free or cheap does not mean it’s something that will survive.
I think I’ve only seen one or two comments that touch on this, but YOU are not the target market. They’re going after higher-end, business users that actually need this kind of service - not web geeks who want to play with the interface for free. Companies that have the $$ in their budget for marketing and design services won’t even blink at the pricing.
Also, the author’s comment: “Yes, Fluxiom has built a nice interface on top of their storage service, but this pricing is flat out outrageous.”… THAT is outrageous. Using that same line of thought, why doesn’t everyone just get a cheap account somewhere and FTP files back and forth? Or invest in thumb drives? Their product IS the interface. S3 is an interesting model, but it’s just storage.
I agree with Bryan–Fluxiom is probably not trying to become the next Flickr or StrongSpace. From what I can tell, they’re looking for business clients to whom 11 or even 100 dollars a month is a fantastic deal if it helps them run their business more efficiently and saves them time.
The owner’s of fluxiom must be watching old re-runs of Dallas where America is portrayed as the land of plenty and wasteful where everyone has a million bucks to throw away.
Costs are now perhaps the most important factor in businesses making decisions about products. Work is being outsourced daily to save $$$. US businesses will not throw money at fluxiom when there are cheaper/equivalent alternatives.
Having our data oversees in Europe someplace is certainly not to our advantage.
I don’t think the Amazon pricing is fair. This is a whole different audience. I’ve worked for ad agencies that pay tens of thousands of dollars every year for their digital asset management (DAM) software, and that’s considered cheap. $11.00/month? That’s not even a drop in the bucket.
I have a few thoughts on the subject which others have also touched on.
Sell the interface, not the storage. Since the value add is in the interface, why even get into the storage game?
While I know that online storage makes money today, this market will become an ultra competitive place to play in. “Lifetime” accounts are becoming more popular in web hosting & online storage alike. As more people sign up for them, the “switching costs” for customers will increase.
I’m no 37signals fan boy by any means, but am an advocate of using what works. Their Basecamp model for storage is perfect. They provide tiered storage for the person or company that doesn’t want to be bothered with worrying about it, at a mark up of course. They also allow the user to plug in their own FTP/SFTP server settings. (Both camps are happy).
That’s right! I think Fluxiom should outsource the online storage piece. They could “team up” with Box.net or Strongspace to provide the storage, while Fluxiom focuses on the value added UI. You can see some of this happening already with Box.net integrating quite nicely into Netvibes.com.
Oh! Evidently they also need to also bring the price down and add a free trial account for some of the other readership.
Just wanted to comment on S3. To begin, I am in the process of building a web service on top of it. I think its a great platform and am excited to see how it works in the wild with our application soon.
The interesting point is bandwidth costs. Consider the $0.20/gig of band. Now I doubt that it is a likely scenario with a service like fluxium that everyone using it in a single company is downloading every byte stored within a month so bear with me for a moment.
Let’s say I’m a 20 person company with 800MB stored on Fluxium in the 29 euro plan. 800MB is uploaded once and then downloaded once by all 20 people. That’s roughly $3.36 cost for bandwidth that month *just for what is sent to and from S3*. Add fixed cost of servers & rack space, bandwidth for the site itself which is probably significant considering everything is graphical, (add in the double hit on the 800mb upload twice when going to S3).
The point I am trying to make is that there is a more to the equation than simply $.20/gig band. The reason GMail is able to offer you 2 gigs is because for the most part your data is sitting there (where the attachments are probably zipped to a size much smaller than 2gigs anyway) and only *you* should be downloading content off of it (some people probably POP it down to three different computers every week but consider them a very small minority). When you get into the realm of theoretically unlimited people downloading X megs your bandwidth costs are multiplied.
S3 is cool though. Personally I believe it will give rise to some great applications (but I’m biased
As for not having a free trial. Considering their value proposition is organization of a team/organization’s digital content and keeping them in a space for you on-line — I can imagine a 20meg free, single user trial being more of a burden than a conversion tool. A demo interface preloaded with a gig of content (which you couldn’t actually download =)… that might be worth doing…
Hey Mike, http://www.swapzies.com is totally free, but never a mention!
I agree with everybody who says that companies of course want to pay for quality storage (fast, secure), better interfaces, professional services etc. plus/minus $50 (or $100) will not be an issue! Not at all!
That said > I don’t really see Fluxioum in this “high-end”, super-focused, top-level professional league at all - why at this point i join the category of people saying that Fluxioun at this point in time is a little too low-end to try to be high-end (actually mid-end > the pricing is NOT that high at all). But in time this might happen …
And by the way: Fluxiom is not just about online storage (and I think the comparison to these vendors is wrong: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006.....rage-gang/).
It’s about solving “file chaos” / “file sharing” effectively; a business objective which is actually a big software business industry (”DAM” > digital asset management) with solutions most often in the many thousand dollars per month category. I know many of these solutions from the marketing industry.
Fluxioum still need a lot to become a good enough alternative to reach pro market acceptance > being very in-expensive is of course OK > but not good enough. The team seems very talented and it’s a fine “version 1.0″.
The photo site http://www.snapfish.com also takes zipped file upload. Works very well for me.
Michael is thinking about this all wrong.
This isn’t about online storage or archiving per se. This is about solving a business problem that has plagued companies for many years: the fact that designers, business decision-makers, and everyone besides engineers is completely unable to use source control systems.
I wrote about this issue two years ago.
http://www.jonathanboutelle.co.....e_des.html
As a business owner with creatives working in other countries, this product is terribly appealing for me. I balk at the price, but if I had the budget I would go for it. This is an “enterprise 2.0″ app, not a consumer thing. Price accordingly.
Mike forgot to mention that registration requires a millionaires24 email address
Alex, check out box.net’s pricing for comparison. And, they will have background sync between desktop and online folders (or so I hope, after more than a month delay ….)
I think that we all understand that Fluxiom is a great UI and that online storage is part of this equation.
It would be great if these new services would allow a user to “plug in” their own server on the backside if so inclined.
Case in point: I’m in the process of downgrading to the free version of Basecamp. Because I used my Strongspace account for the file storage, I can walk away from the aforementioned service cleanly with all of my files intact. New services like Fluxiom should follow suit in my opinion.
Just tried it, uploaded stuff, wasn’t impressed with the speed of the interface, but the UI was really quite attractive. It doesn’t seem like it would be hard for someone else to put that pretty UI on something that isn’t so ridiculously overpriced.
It’s would probably be fraud to use a fake credit card number, even one of the test ones like 4111 or 4242 and in a situation like this. Unless encouraged by the site of course! You could argue it is their fault to for not pre-authorising a card for the amount of next month. But still. Think!
amazon are offering a wholsesale storage price and anyone building applications on top of this will likely try and mark it up.
I like this idea:
“It would be great if these new services would allow a user to “plug in” their own server on the backside if so inclined.”
We use basecamp as well, and do all file storage on our own ftp site. Let me pay for the value-add (Search, tagging, organization) and I’ll happily bring my own storage!
However, from a business perspective, holding the data gives them “lock-in”, so you can understand why fluxiom hasn’t implemented something like this.
I did not manage to get the Fake CC to work.
If anyone has any suggestions for me, drop me a letter at:
vladzaharia[nospATnosp]gmail[nospDOTnosp]com