Somebody pointed me to this forum saying my service might be a good fit for the people here.
I’m currently Beta testing https://chia-plots.com/ which is offering a fully self-serviced plotting service. Every 24 hours a new reverse auction starts for the available slots in that time window. The price for the auction decreases every ten minutes. When you find a price that suits your needs you can place your order your plots will be generated with that 24 hours time-frame.
I’m getting a lot of valuable feedback but I’m always looking for more, so if you are a farmer looking for some extra plots then please do check me out and let me know what you think!
Interesting concept. What made you go with the auction model rather than just flat rate pricing?
One small suggestion: do a geo lookup from the browser and change the price to USD for us 'mericans (or even just have a toggle I can click). I realize you’re probably getting traffic from all over the world, but the USD is fairly common to standardize against.
It’s mostly about price discovery at this point. Deciding how I scale up the business will mostly depend on the price people are willing to pay per plot. I have different scenarios. When people are willing to pay higher prices I can make everything fully scalable by depending on cloud providers for the plotting. On the lower end I will have to just slowly add hardware to my DC. Once the Chia has an official price things will be more clear as well as the recoup time for a plot can be calculated. Until that time I will have the market decide the price and plan my future investments (in time and money) accordingly.
That’s actually something I’m already working on. It will allow you to also buy harvester hosting when you request plots. In that case you won’t get a download link but the files will be added to your personal harvester. It will still require a main node that you host yourself. I don’t want to host any wallets.
For one small steps though. Let’s see if the plotting is something people want at this point while I build out the hosting offer.
I’ve actually spoke to a couple of my beta users who raised some valid points that the reverse auction is a bit annoying since you don’t really want to check back every time to check on the price. I’ve now made it a fixed price that might differ a bit per auction based on available hardware.
Every twelve hours (9 CEST) a new auction comes online; if all auctions are sold out a yellow banner will announce the next auction coming up. I have no notification system in place yet but I could build one.
I would definitely be interested partnering with others to set up, and/or investing in a Farming as a Service business. I think it would make sense to assess viability after May 3rd though! I wonder what would be the right commercial arrangement - small % of $XCHs earned, or fixed monthly fee?