I want to live in a world where tarsnap is sold for picodollars.
I know I am and that this 14 days clause is the only reason why I am not using tarsnap.
Wouldn't that make you one of Colin's most serious competitors? I thought you made most of your money from the enterprise market. The same market Patio is suggesting Colin enter!
Not if you reconsider "backup for the truly paranoid" and ponder about who actually IS the paranoid and what he is paranoid about. Could it be him being paranoid about not wanting to run after his customers money for a service that already has been provided?
> if you believe you must check on every detail, your style is symptomatic of insecurity or paranoia - http://www.adams-hall.com/micwilstrany.html
In any case, my ";)" from before stands.
Sounds like easy money all around, and colin won't have to deal with the support fallout (nor get paid to deal with it, which is ok).
What if auto-renew were added, but you're robbed and knocked into a coma for 2 months. In the meanwhile, the credit card company notices the suspicious transactions, can't get a hold of you, and cancels the card. Auto-renew occurs 3 days later, but the card number on file doesn't work. Colin Percival calls your phone number, and gets no answer for a month. Then what?
If you're truly paranoid, you might have to consider that possibility as well.
With every scenario and solution you can come up with which require intervention, I can double down on and think of a worse-case scenario where your solution won't work and you'll lose your data. A possible non-intervention solution could work, which is to front-load the account to the limits of your paranoia.
1) Paranoid that you will lose your data.
2) Paranoid that your data will fall into the wrong hands.
It seems to me that Tarsnap values preventing #2 over preventing #1.
To follow on your example, what if the authorities who arrested you want to get their mitts on the data in your tarsnap account? Won't you be happy that your data is irrevocably deleted?
Besides, even the truly paranoid don't know when they're going to lose access to emails for two weeks. Sudden hospitalisation? Travelling in an internet poor area, and your hotel that promised access was 'down'? Temporary incarceration for something you never did? Death of a loved one that puts you out of your normal life procedures? Or just fat-fingering a command because you're human, and missing out on the email from an accidental bulk delete (or similar). Perhaps change it to an opt-in for the truly paranoid: "If you're uncontactable for two weeks and our billing system decides you're out, delete my data rather than merely revoke access".
After all, if you're really after a 'dead-man switch', then that should be a feature on it's own, not something to do with billing. "If I haven't logged in for -foo- weeks, delete my data". That's clearly a dead-man switch, not a proxy analogue conducted via "we've consumed what's left on your account". Plus the user could set the number of weeks, rather than just "some unpredictable future time".
If tarsnap is really a G2G business, then it makes sense to assume you know how to white-list an email address.
How many other misconfigurations should they deal with? What if the battery is dead on your cell phone when they try to call you after several missed the emails? (Or you're out hiking where there's no reception, or on a cruise, or in another country and didn't want to pay high roaming charges, or ...)
Another possibility would be for there to be an 'authorized' premium B2B version - where the original author gets a certain X% ownership, and the slick-marketing type does all the fluff/flashy stuff that adds value for that set of customers.