We spent quite a bit of time implementing the features needed to make this step possible. We wanted to do this before the 1st of july and this is the first time they hear about it, but they have 15 days to actually get everything off and we have a button for that. So they are not hostages; they just cannot upload new images. I will try to word this more clearly.
I have never heard of picturepush, but I will share my reaction. Your letter is straightforward and to the point, and I would appreciate that as a user. My only issue would be the timeframe.
Pictures are really important to people, and many people don't know what to do with all of their digital images. 15 and 30 days sounds like plenty of time to you, but that is no time at all to people who haven't been thinking about doing something different with their pictures. That is especially true when you think about the people who won't get this message right away.
I second the idea of putting your data in cheap storage for as long as you can. A respectful timeframe, if you can make it happen, seems like about 6 months. Getting some revenue initially might make that more feasible. I wonder if you might offer an incentive for people to pay up quickly? For example, anyone who pays for 1 year of service before the 15 days are up gets a discount of x%?
Anyways, I do appreciate the straightforward tone of your letter, and I hope the transition goes well for you and your users.
We are not a big site, but we have loyal fans. Unfortunately the loyal fans are mostly not of the spontaneous paying kind which landed us in making losses for many months trying to find some other way to sustain the growth. Our marketing efforts were also focused on the EU mainly because that market is already large enough.
Thank you both for the long term storage advice; we will probably use Glacier. We'll try to see if we can use a combi between Glacier, S3 and our local caching to keep the images downloadable for a few months. But not for live showing as that + hotlinking is where the cost comes from.
Also, especially in the EU, do not forget it's summer, hence a vacation period so some user could only find out after their vacations that their pictures are gone !
