Hey,
I just released a chia plotting cloud service. I got my first purchases and now I know what my actual costs are. 
At the moment the cost is 5$ per plot. Some services are above this some are below.
I can work to optimize the costs of course but I need to know how much you are ok to pay for a plot?
Thanks for the answers in advanced.
Hi we are competing in offering this kind of service , but i just want to be honest and say that we are having difficulties selling at 2eur \plot , we also offered free plot and had an automated system with a management hi , i don’t know what can be offered more but honestly i think that most of initial customers have already fulfilled initial needs and new customers doesn’t have the same initial fomo that require buying plot from third parties…
Maybe has been just me experience… i found also that a lot of plotting services are faking real sales to look gibber and established in order to attract more customers… while instead sold almost nothing
This is also to say to not believe those you see that seems are selling 6$\plot with 200 sales\day… do deep research before investing in something that is becoming harder every day
i dont think its possible to go below 1€(1.22$)/plot without ruining every chance to scale atleast a bit
for me at that point the costs are around 0.8€ per plot(power, traffic, bandwith, ssd replacements, hdd replacements) and almost every human time spent on a customer/plot blows 100 plots out of “budget”. and the whole thing becomes basically non profit, for fun and learning 
which my service is build upon. you can make a profit with 2-3€ a plot outside the cloud(unless u run down a clouds business and risk getting banned n fined, and usually traffic is extremely expensive(5-10$ a plot))
and u would be suprised, we seen a lot of people getting very angry for paying 1€/plot for 1000tb of plots which should arrive in 10 days…, neither hardware, nor human time is that cheap to allocate in that time span.
Looking at the pricing of https://chiafactory.com/ and how many plots day do per 24 hours. It seems like there is a demand. 
This numbers may be wrong but still…
Also probably after releasing the pooling protocol more people would start plotting again?
I can’t see how running such service on your own hardware could be salable in any way. We are running on different cloud providers and this 1.22$ is a dream so far 
I think it’s faked numbers… why those customers buy from them when i’m selling at 2e plot, see my site, the gauge in homepage about my service is real and it’s mostly running free plots now i don’t have even covered servers cost because you should be running at average 60% without counting free plots to pay for them at least
It may be that their service is older, or the website gains more trust or because they did a better job of marketing it.
Or it may just be fake. Who knows…
Cloudflares Bandwith Alliances + Private Hardware + Some Colocations + Night Time power costs reductions(some plotters are in serbia, different prices at night …), is a lot of effort.
Older but people are not dumb why pay 1000 of can pay 300? Plus I’m also giving free to allow testing the service, also provide tested plots with test results…
I’m pretty sure they are fake, there are a lot of sites out there Wich seems good with 0 customers and some with high price and hundreds customers… seems wrong to me… like fake reviews fake numbers attracts potential customers for sure (but i don’t think that someone is willing to pay triple price )
Thanks for sharing your experience @chia-plotting.com
Think that’s useful information for a lot of people out there.
Although your guys business might pick up again when pools are ready. Hard to say though also depends on how much space people have left, price netspace etc.
But there are many people now not willing to invest in plots they cannot use for the pools, so they are waiting for that
Interesting discussion to read. I’m not in the business of buying plots as its really a wonderful part of the process. I’ve only spent $3K on dedicated plotting rig, compared to 7K on storage. If I had spent that 3K on plots at $5/plot I would have only filled half my storage. At $2/plot its getting viable but even still, I can resell the plotting rig for 2/3 what I paid in 6 months.
I’m not your target market, just sharing my thoughts
Thanks for the input. I will add the following comments:
I’m not trying to convince you. Just some thoughts. Probably a price ~ 2$ would really start to make sense.
In China, it’s currently appox. at 0.2-0.5 USD range, so…
(time to learn some Chinese?)
Could you share some links to them please?
Zero personally, but for lots of people it will end being pennies/cents - the main cost of a plot for me isn’t producing it, it’s storing it - and I’m not in the cloud, it’s the cost of buying disks, enclosures, cabling, etc. That will (well, might) become an ongoing cost, whereas the cost of plotting hardware is a fixed cost and uses more resalable machines that I had or wanted anyway (mid-tier and high-tier Ryzens). I’m not sure I’d pay an ongoing fee to fill up disks ever so slightly faster, and when you factor in download speed I doubt you’d be that much faster - and that applies at any scale, since if I can afford X disks I can afford Y plotters to fill them up in a reasonable time.
On the other hand, if you were offering very competitive per TB hosting and harvesting in the cloud, with an interface like Amazon’s Snowball (where you courier a storage appliance that I fill and courier back), then I’m very interested, although it would have to be competitive with the per TB price of (used) disks multiplied by about 6 months for me to consider it.
Assuming you don’t own a physical data centre and are paying someone else for your cloud infra - when I looked into it I couldn’t find a way to make cloud plotting work economically on paper, either with cloud hosting or shipping data back out, that suggests you’re trying to make money by selling something that isn’t worth money for some markup (since if I did it myself in the cloud it would not be economical).
If you’ve found a way, I can’t imagine the margins are very good. That said, cloud plotting and harvesting is possibly the only thing that explains the massive netspace growth, not many entities other than the major clouds have EB scale storage lying around unused and/or easily provisioned. Maybe the latest brief pause in netspace growth is a lot of people seeing their end-of month cloud bills.
Currently looking at 540$/mo for 100tb full of plots
And + 50$/mo farmer, feels cheaper than hard drives even across 6 months, and I only pay for what I use, will see how it scales, it may not work out
That’s not so bad for storage, although that 6 month cost of ownership is about double what I pay for used HDDs (today!) per TB, that of course doesn’t include all the additional hardware I need to keep them spinning, so not bad at all.
If I keep growing I’ll eventually need to think about something like that as well as what I have physically - however, that’s just the storage cost, are there ingress fees? Do you have to plot in the same cloud, etc?
Either way I can’t see I’d ever personally be interested in a plotting service - unless it was cheaper than finding out whatever cloud provider the plotting service used and running my plots there directly without whatever margin the plotting service takes, but that’s me.
Storage at backblaze(u only pay for used storage and no mimum retention time) , no traffic /bandwith costs cause of bandwirh alliance between Cloudflare and lots of cloud providers, farmer at one of these cloud /baremeral providers
Using my own plotting service 
(1€/plot)
If u believe u gonna keep plots for more than 3 months I would checkout wasabi/crowdstorage, it’s 1/5 cheaper
you can see the result of this recent poll here: What's a fair price to pay for Plotting as a Service (PaaS)? (poll)