Zotero Storage Pricing Policies

ulahcherubim

Before I dive into my rant, I would like to say that I am very grateful for Zotero. It was definitely a huge help with my MA and continue to facilitate my PhD.
But we need to talk about pricing of storage...

1. Zotero storage payment should not be yearly only.
Counter argument: When payment is monthly, there would be issues with people forgetting to resubscribe or not updating the payment information. This would result in more people complaining about Zotero storage losing their data.

2. Zotero storage should offer more tiers for convenience. For example now I have around 7 GB of storage used but I had to pay for unlimited storage which is whopping 120$. I could have paid 80$ for 10GB or 100$ for 20GB or so.
Counter argument: When more tiers presented, this would lead to issues with people changing tiers. Even with 3 tiers, people complain about how the subscription durations are calculated.

3. Zotero storage should offer regional pricing.
This is due to heavy pricing of unlimited storage. 120$ equals to around %7 of my salary as a researcher. In Türkiye, most researcher have a salary about mine and trust me, getting refunded for a purchase like this is nearly impossible outside of projects which have main expenses already eating through their limited budgets.
Counter argument: This would leave the burden of hosting on Zotero. Since hosting and offering fast cloud services like Zotero's are costly, discounted rates might not cover the costs.

All in all, I wish for arguments from the Zotero developers' side.
I already paid for my second year of unlimited storage but for a hefty price which would put strain on my budget this month.

tim820

Your point about different relative costs in different regions is well-taken. For students and others for whom the cost of storage plans is prohibitive, there are lower- or zero-cost options like linked files (facilitated by a plugin like Zotmoov) or WebDAV. They do take more effort to set up though. And they come with some limitations, so people may need to consider what workflows are vital and which might be less important. Of course if people only need to use Zotero on one computer they can store as many files as they like locally (for free); also, online *data* storage is free and unlimited (and thus accessible in the web library and the mobile apps). There are also other options like portable external drives that some people use (eg for linked attachment files).
https://www.zotero.org/support/attaching_files#linked_files
https://www.zotero.org/support/sync#webdav