myfrogger
Thank you for the detailed responses. I'm using I use Windows and iPhone. My initial thought with the favicon is the current folder with the letters S3 on it. I'd have to do a bit of thinking and asking around at identifying the target market for this product. I'm not even sure S3Drive is the best name for marketing purposes. I don't dislike it though; just rambling.
As far as those coming from Dropbox, Onedrive, etc, etc.... I think that the E2EE/control or own your data is a significant selling point and also the "pay for what you need". I don't know why all these companies have different "packages" when it seems easier to onboard people to a pay-as-you-go model. Apple seems to be the only one that figured it out that millions of people don't care about a $0.99 fee but they do care about $5-10. I think that you could monetize by having your own built in cloud (simply putting everyone's data into your own BackBlaze or Wasabi account). At least then when someone downloads the app, there is a usable setting without any further configuration. Maybe offer X 50gb free storage like everyone else. I remember reading years ago that getting someone to use the app the moment they download it is critical to keeping them as a user.
I think you should embrace accepting bitcoin, lightning, and maybe some other crypto payments. Also embrace the community that wants their data private. Don't ask for names, don't log their details, etc. For cards use stripe. Maybe this not a project that you'll monetize but I feel like this could be a full time job, and an opportunity to make a great product that people would pay for.
Anyway---I agree with you that you can't do everything at once, and the priorities appear to be ordered in a logical way. Keep up the good work 
I'm happy to be an early user and maybe able to contribute somehow along the way. (edited) @myfrogger You're absolutely spot on. We're researching what cloud we could use or whether we need to build our own one (likely MinIO based). Ideally we would pay predictable amount for the resources and resell it at some margin as a complete solution back to the users. The issue with Wasabi, Backblaze and many other clouds is that we can't control the costs as a business (there are many components) and can't easily specify quota per user account, so we don't bankrupt if one user decides to abuse the S3 credentials.
Building own cloud on the other hand is additional chunk of work that we would like to avoid, more importantly it comes with huge responsibility, some legal burden and maintenance costs (infrastructure updates, security fixes, SLA, outages, on-call...).
We'd also like to leave a room for power users which would like to use their own S3 back-end, so we're not locking anyone with our ecosystem. ~90-95% users would likely use our default offering, because it's convenient, but if someone would like to set up their own MinIO instance using their NAS or whatever, then go ahead.
We'll come back to that, but first priority is to build a stable S3 protocol clients.
I would love this to be a full-time gig, at the moment it is a full time volunteering and won't be source of income for long, but that's fine. I am extremely excited building technology which helps people to keep their data private without giving it up to seemingly "free" alternatives. It's quite challenging explaining people that "free" software that they use it's actually not free (they pay by their data being sold and mismanaged), these very same people will say: "I've nothing to hide", they're majority and not a target of our offering. There is still significant community of people who actually do mind protecting their privacy. I would rather stay in that circle.
... and I am glad to have a users like you who open up and give proper feedback. Thank you ! (edited)
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