Bitcasa

» see bitcasa.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

in 2014 i was using dropbox like every other engineer with a laptop. bitcasa was a us-pitched startup with an unlimited-storage offer that read like a free-lunch promise. the people who needed unlimited storage were running stack-of-drives torrent caches, and the people running stack-of-drives torrent caches are exactly who you do not want as your only customers if you priced the service flat at $99 a year. i did not sign up. plenty of others did.

tony gauda and kevin blackham started bitcasa in st louis in 2011 and moved the company to mountain view shortly after the 2011 techcrunch disrupt sf launch. the infinite drive offer launched in 2012 with client-side encryption and version history. a media-streaming layer sat on top. the product itself was clever. the business model was not.

in october 2014 the company killed the unlimited plan and gave existing subscribers 23 days to migrate or lose their data. a class-action suit followed. judge william alsup of the northern district of california issued a temporary restraining order on 13 november 2014 preventing bitcasa from deleting subscriber data. some users still lost files in the migration anyway. the consumer service was officially shut down on 20 may 2016 and the website was inaccessible by september. there were no refunds.

~ the record ~

~ the fall ~

the unlimited-storage math has never worked for any consumer cloud service that priced it flat. mozy tried it in 2008 and reversed in 2011. crashplan home and amazon cloud drive both followed the same pattern later in the decade. bitcasa was the first to be sued over the reversal, not the last service to try the model.

~ the day it died ~

on 20 may 2016 bitcasa announced the consumer infinite drive plan would terminate. existing customers were redirected to download their files through a clunky migration tool that timed out on large folders. some files were never recoverable. the company pivoted to a b2b business called crystalcloud and disappeared from public view shortly after. the storage industry took the lesson, which is that you do not promise unlimited anything you have to pay for by the gigabyte.

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