Pricing Edited 14/03/2012Starting to near final production costs + prices IMHO.
Options for +~50% setup fee of hardware value for lower monthly will be provided if there is demand.
Setup fees: 195€ for billing terms monthly & quarterly, 75€ for longer cycles (6months, 12months).
RATES:BFL Single: 49.95€
Icarus/X6500: 37.95€
Z-Tex: 29.95€
7970: 42.95€
6770: 19.95€
5830: 33.95€ ** TO BE VERIFIED -> Unknown power consumption per GPU
Quarterly rate(3 months): Monthly rate * 3
Semi-annual rate(6 months): Monthly rate * 6
Annual rate(12 months): Monthly rate * 12
PRICES IN USD: RATE * 1.34 (Xe.com 27th of March)
Which results in Mhash per € costs:BFL Single: 16.61Mhash / €
Icarus/X6500: 10.01Mhash / €
Z-Tex: 7.01Mhash / €
7970: 12.80Mhash / €
6770: 10.02Mhash / €
5830: 9.43Mhash / €
This means that at 6month payment cycle (no setup fee later on), your effective 1st year costs would be, including overheads, electricts etc etc, only the single payment, no hidden charges:
BFL Single: 599.4€
Icarus: 455.4€
Z-Tex: 359.€
7970: 515.4€
6770: 239.4€
5830: 407.4€
Expect 2-4% lower price on 12month payment cycle.
All prices exclude VAT 23%
Reseller options will be featured. Bulk discounts will be offered. Please contact me for additional information.
The important questions are ....
How can you offer below HW costs?Economies of scale, long term goals. The HW payoff is set far into the 2nd year, only thing that matters is
positive constant cash flow.
Standardized setups will allow us to spend a lot of R&D to push through more efficiency.
For europeans just acquiring the HW will cost more than the annual price! Slight difference, but not much.
This kind of pricing will allow bigger operators to scale faster if supplies last.
Why, oh why? Couldn't you just mine and earn more?Likely, yes. But this often yields revenue upfront vs. mining which is constant small flow. Also there will be some HW to hash for ourselves, but that is mostly the items which is waiting to be provisioned/burn-in test, old HW, testing setups etc. which might yield for us at some points of time even 10Ghash/s+ in burn-in testing!
Also, this will yield something which i appreciate: Known, stable return on investment. BTC value goes up & down, and we would at times need to wait months before we could sell BTC, making scaling efforts really slow at times.
Personally, i prefer to hold on to my BTC anyway!
When?Proof of concepts will be built by end of April, launch shortly there after. Some beta accounts will be available.
Full sales should begin no later than end of August, targeting 1st of June.
What we need to do is:
- Web interface
- Interface pool setup
- Lots and Lots of statistics and graphs
- HW testing, finalizing setups and verifying the average GPU can work at the clocks we want to
- Setup GPU farm location ready to accept nodes: building shelves, wiring, ensure stability etc.
- API for advanced users
- Website + billing (graphics being the most time consuming)
- Setup other usage options for GPGPU, ie. Folding@Home
What if no one is interested?Doesn't matter, we'll just mine bitcoins for ourselves then
![Smiley](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
Sure then a lot of hours will be wasted into research and development which would have not otherwise been done, but overally i consider the opportunity costs to be rather fair.
Who can get an beta account?Those who can give us productive feedback, only a few will be accepted
How are you able to finance this?We are an established hosting company with some options for self financing few ghash growth per month on average without affecting other operations at all.
If demand is great we might accept a limited amount of preordering, preorders would be limited to something which we can handle to provide within a ~month, not 4-6months
![Wink](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/wink.gif)
For FPGAs the queue might be longer due to the nature of FPGAs arriving in batches, and there is no constant supply.
Shipments from US (ie. BFL Single) happens only once every 1-2months as well because it makes no sense to have small shipments from our US warehouse.
Do i get HW access, so can i OC the GPUs?NO! OC'ng will make the lifespan of the GPU far shorter, in extreme cases into just weeks instead of years, nevermind the increased wattage and lower Mhash/W ratio. Further, there is group of people who doesn't give a shit about others and will kill the GPUs in a month if it yields them even 0.1€ more revenue, and would cause expenses to skyrocket with constant RMAs and replacement HW purchases (You can RMA single GPU only so many times ...). Further crash of single GPU causes whole node to crash, likely causing downtime for other customers on the same node as well.
That being said, we are targeting high performance, for example 600-650Mhash for 7970, if not more. Final testing will show.
FPGAs will run at the rates they are delivered, or in case of X6500 what every unit can run with combined few % safety margin, likely 190-200Mhz range. Icarus will yield ~380Mhash, BFL Single ~830.
Scale maximum?2012 Fall: Current locations will be scaled to a total of approximately: 20Ghash/s in GPUs and 20Ghash/s for FPGAs.
2012 Winter: 60Ghash/s in GPUs utilizing current locations (Requires new electric circuits). FPGAs can be temporarily be hosted where GPUs are.
2013: Likely new location will be acquired, scouting will take a little bit of time. New location will add a minimum of ~20kW capacity at the start (80 to 200Ghash/s), but might require AC for cooling. We have a potential backup location with 6kW capacity available. We will acquire similar locations on as-needed basis.