Rapidshare

September 7, 2010 4:23 AM

Does anyone understand Rapidshare anymore? They have this new RapidPro scheme which seems totally convoluted to me. I can't make head or tail of it.

All I knew before is that I paid for, say, a month, and had almost-unlimited download capability for that month. That's it. Now there's this thing about buying Rapids, whatever those are...
I'm trying a download a file now, and get this message:

You want to download the following file. [...] The RapidPro feature has not been activated in your account or you do not have enough traffic.
Please activate RapidPro by purchasing Rapids.

I don't remember whether or not I activated RapidPro, and looking around the website, haven't been able to find out. It's all just so vague!
So if anyone can explain this mess, I'd be very grateful. Bonus question: How can they expect me to pay for something I can't even understand?

posted by Silky Slim to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Response by poster: OK, I wrote too soon. A tab called "Account Overview" has my balance and extending options. So please ignore.
I still don't understand Rapids, though.
posted by Silky Slim at 4:26 AM on September 7, 2010

This seems to explain it.

For 99 Rapids you get - for 30 days - 10GB storage and 30GB of traffic.
Additional storage:
1 GB = 2 Rapids/month
Additional traffic:
5 GB = 14 Rapids

Rapids start at 400 for €4.99, up to 20,000 for €199.

There's a bunch more explanation of their new accounts and stuff on there that I don't really understand having never had a RapidShare account, but that's what Rapids are, at least.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 4:34 AM on September 7, 2010

Thanks--I too, was unable to figure out what Rapidshare wanted me to do. Got bogged down trying to purchase "Rapids", though, and went back to torrents.
posted by Savannah at 6:29 AM on September 7, 2010

Basically, it's like a prepaid cell phone use. You buy a certain value card, and based on the services you use, that value gets decremented at different rates (local vs international calls.etc). In this case, RS has created their own virtual currency - "Rapids", which can you obtain by buying or having someone donate them to you. Once you have the Rapids, you can use them to subscribe to Rapidshare's premium service. The reason this setup seems convoluted is that Rapidshare overhauled their old business model to this newer Rapids model but with a whole tier of packages costing different rates. That switch was received very negatively, so just after a week, they switched to this present trimmed offering, but kept the Rapids system, making it somewhat puzzling. The current model is actually cheaper by 30% if one downloads 150GB/month (as was the allowance in the old model). If you download less, it's even cheaper.
posted by daksya at 6:43 AM on September 7, 2010

The new system confused me too, but I found using the Rapidshare Download Manager that you can get on their website works really well to help you understand what's going on. I never knew how much 'download traffic' versus 'rapids' I had, but if you go under the Settings tab there's a neat little area that shows 'Traffic Left' (the amount of data that you can download) and 'Rapids' (which has a button next to that that immediately exchanges them for download traffic).

Once I found that tab it made my life 10x easier. Just knowing how many Rapids you have and how much you can download makes the system much easier. When you run out of rapids, just buy some more and you can always know how many you have.
posted by Isos at 7:33 AM on September 7, 2010

The most important thing to remember is that they heavily discount the amount of traffic consumed from about 8PM EST to 4AM EST, so that you are only using up 10% of your rapid points. So if you have a large amount of stuff to download and you can wait, do it then.
posted by inthe80s at 1:28 PM on September 13, 2010