Farchiver as a Business (Part 2 of a 4-part series)

Many crypto projects over-promise and under-deliver. One game is to build hype, announce features before they are ready, start the flywheel.

In contrast, Farchiver is building in public as a sustainable business. Hopefully, the choices we've made create a stronger foundation for the business, which provides more upfront confidence in the product.

TL;DR

• pricing

• costs

• roadmap

Pricing

KISS. Buy once, own the Farchive forever.

Base price is 0.005 ETH per quarter. Free samples + discounts for early-users.

Compare with Farcaster storage units, which cost ~0.0032 ETH on-chain, or ~0.0055 ETH via Apple/Google, and expire after one year. Most early Farcaster accounts have two storage units.

Costs

Farchiver primarily uses protocol-level primitives, rather than convenience API services. This is much slower, but also more robust and less dependent on business decisions by others.

Hub (~$50/month incl. compute + RPC access), Replicator (~$20/month). Neynar ($9/month as bootstrap). Domain name + hosting (~$1/month). Farcaster account ($1/month). These costs will fluctuate, probably increasing as usage + network value grows.

Dev and ops time + labor. Mostly front-loaded, with ongoing costs expected to whittle down over time, replaced with automation.

Roadmap

Public Goods: important threads saved as Public Farchives.

Farchives as building block for other Farcaster apps: useful for permanently saving content (with credible neutrality + promise of immortality). Displaying comments, testimonials, and providing permalinks that point to interactive spaces for perusal.

Farchives as building block for personal (self-owned) platforms: React components for publishing to a blog platform; UI-agnostic components that rely on Farchive data + metadata.

Farchiver as testbed for new crypto primitives: e.g., Quilibrium MPC for encryption, Mod Protocol for credible storage, Fabric Hypersub for subscriptions. Will be guided by customer interest.

Up Next: Farchiver Security