Your points regarding data storage and retention are really interesting and they’ve spurred some conversations at Sepia Labs. Thanks for sharing your input!

Also, at the same time minimize IT costs by finding a way to offload storage to the user. Perhaps you could develop an encrypted sharing model where data is loaded on a random peer’s drive in an encrypted fashion. The only one with the key is the one owner of the data. Glassboard doesn’t know where it is and doesn’t have the key. Get users to put up their own storage. You give 10GB you get 10GB. In the era of TB storage drives, who cares?

Another way to keep down costs would be to delete data after a certain amount of time. The best data retention policy is to permanently delete all data. Are these communications really that important? If so, perhaps one can copy their email address so that it is stored there. The rest should be deleted. That’s a plus, not a negative.

Or pay to post anything other than pictures / text? E.g. pay for videos, PDFs, Word documents…

Or pay for the amount of data your board is taking up? I post pictures and the size of each picture will soon add up?

Pay for longevity? Say your board messages will exist for a month, if you want it to live for longer you should pay?

Pay for extra features like Dropbox integration on mobile?

As you struggle with where to draw that line, it would be reassuring to know that everything we have so far is considered a core feature that will remain a core feature even after we have become invested in using Glassboard. Beyond that, I have no problem paying for enhanced features. For example, I’d pay for a version of the app for my iPhone that allowed me to attach files to my posts that can be downloaded like email attachments by Board members.