Haven pricing update

Like many of you may know, the global market for computer RAM and NVMe storage has increased a considerable amount due to the demand by AI. As we develop Haven, these costs directly impact the final price we can offer to you, so we obvviously have a vested interest in how this changes our pricing.

For those who aren’t familiar, Haven is network storage made for musicians and audip professionals. It’s basically our Tonic Audio collaboration app you can find here today, but a local version that’s blazing fast.

So what the heck happened to components costs? Basically, the global demand of these particular components have gone up a drastic amount due to AI companies purchasing more servers for their data centers. The manufacturers of these components of course have started shifting capacity to these buyers, which leaves less for small device makers like us.

To give an idea of what it’s looked like, here is how much NVMe storage has increased since we started tracking these prices:

As you can see, the 1TB NVMe storage more than tripled in price, and we estimate that a Haven unit with 4TB would be one of the biggest sellers, so storage cost for that that was a bit over $200 is now $664. We don’t plan on marking up storage as it’s so volatile anyway, we figure we’ll get the best pricing we can, and just sell it at cost. But even at cost, a tripling of price makes it harder to hit the price points we’re after.

We’re considering a few different approaches to this. One is to wait it out and hope this is just a blip and supply kicks back in. Another is to find alternative vendors (though not all storage is created equal, and we need a certain level of quality to hit our reliability goals). We also considered cutting into the margins briefly, but that’s a dangerous game as we have no idea how long (or how much worse) this could get.

So that leaves us with the tough decision to increase the price of Haven to something that covers these cost increases, while still providing the level of storage performance and redundancy needed.

We’ve also decided to offer a Haven Core version of the product, which has no storage in it at all. This is helpful for people who already have storage they purchased for existing computers or NAS devices, and they can just move them over to a Haven device. This lets us avoid NVMe price increases, but unfortunately not the RAM price increases.

While we continue to develop Haven, we’ll be closely watching what this market continues to do, and will update you all as we know more.

It’s ironic that one of the primary reasons we designed Haven is to give you direct, private access to your files, hidden from the prying eyes of AI training bots. And the AI industry is making it really difficult to sell Haven at a price point that makes sense.

Thanks as always for supporting us through this process. We appreciate all of you, and hope to get Haven into your hands in short order. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out to us at contact@tonicaudio.com