I've been a customer for a while, maybe 3 years at least... was just poking around and realized I missed the notice about the price increase. It's pretty remarkable, but at the same time after reading your replies to the complaints I suddenly got it. Phanfare's value is that it is primary storage. I didn't realize this was a premium value until now, even though over the years Phanfare has morphed into this for me. I stopped using my hard drives and CDs as backup about a year ago, when it just became too much of a pain for my 15G, growing at 5G per year. $99 is a big lump sum, but at $8/mo it's really not that bad for a storage service that erases the need for all the backing up time and inherent weaknesses that come with doing it yourself and keeping storage media at home. I don't think this value comes out in Phanfare's marketing... but as more things move to the cloud I think consumers are getting this method more. However Phanfare is a small brand so you should leverage Amazon's good name to get people comfortable with relying on a small company. I just hope that if, in the unfortunate event Phanfare were to not make it, that all the promises of keeping our photos forever will still be good. About the worst thing in the world would be to rely on a service for primary storage, have it go out of business, and have lost years of priceless photos. Would Amazon cover this? You might want to address this in your marketing too - it is the one thing that makes me nervous about using Phanfare. Thanks.

The good news is that at our new prices, Phanfare is now profitable and
hence our promise of being primary storage is actually much stronger. I
agree with you that we don't do a great job of marketing the fact that you
can stop worrying about backing up your media locally when you use Phanfare.
The story is still coming together, even after six years! For example, today
the workflow around using Phanfare as primary storage probably involves
using a different local organizer (picasa, lightroom, aperture) to acquire
photos off the card and then pushing to Phanfare. This is a cumbersome
workflow we realize but we can't today be a complete replacement for the
local organizer. For example, we don't have local printing (except from the
iphone app).

When we first started the company, we hoped to have our mac and PC clients
be the local organizer that would also acquire photos, but as a small
company we never quite managed to get those programs where they needed to be
to serve that purpose.

That said, once your collection is on Phanfare, our web and iphone tools are
pretty good at being your primary organizer. And they are getting better.
For example, we just added fast search, essential for large collections.

On the iPad (and eventually Android), we think we may be able to do what we
never quite managed to do on the Mac and PC: be your primary downloadable
organizer that keeps it state in sync with the cloud. We are not quite there
yet, and Apple is not either (we need iOS 4.1 for the iPad) but look for
some very cool stuff there.

In terms of value, Phanfare is a great deal if you value the archival
storage as you point out. And our business model, which is fairly
conservative, is well aligned with our customers interests. By staying cash
flow positive and growing slowly, we don't risk the business. That's
essential for a business like Phanfare where we are custodians of important
assets.

It is not just nice to have referred friends last year and to have to tell them now that prices have doubled... so even though the referral bonus is now 4 times as high ($40 instead of $10) that makes me not do it again.