Monthly fees can add up. While you probably realize the monthly fees you pay for your car or mortage add up to tens or hundrds of thousands of dollars, how often do you stop to think of the other fees in your life? How much money have you spent over the years on cable or cellphone bills? What online storage space?
iForem has come up with a way to eliminate the monthly fees for its online backup storage site. It just charges a really high price up front. We're talking $20 for 20MB of storage, or $1024 for 1GB. Sure, you can get storage from services like
Mozy and
Carbonite for a fairly low monthly fee, but if you stop paying, you lose your storage.
What makes iForem's model unique (beside the high price) is a guarantee that your data will always be available. The idea is that iForem will take your ridiculously high up-front payment and invest it in a trust. As your money makes money for the company, some of that revenue will be pumped back into server space, security, and all the other things you'd want from an online storage site. Over time, as your friends continue to pay monthly fees to their online backup companies, you'll (theoretically) realize that they've paid more money over the years than you have.
But the way we see it, there's at least three problems:
- You can already get 5GB for free from services like Xdrive.
- 1GB in 20 years will probably seem pretty tiny.
- If the company goes under in less than 15 years, you're not going to get your money's worth.
[via
Mashable]