The Feigou plan, in one sentence: install a few-megabyte client, and the idle computers and phones in your home become your private cloud drive.
The business model is simpler: sell secondhand phones, and what you’ve actually sold is a lifetime 1TB drive. Fifteen hundred yuan up front; if it dies within a year, I replace it — a dead Xiaomi gets swapped for an OPPO, because what I’m selling isn’t the phone. It’s the storage. Essentially, I’m selling insurance: the phone is the claim item, the secondhand market is the supplier. I don’t even need inventory — when you order, I buy a 1TB phone on the spot and ship it to you.
The pricing works: at 399 a year I’d probably be profitable — your phone probably won’t break, and a replacement costs me eight or nine hundred, helped by supply-chain, repair, and information advantages. The cloud-drive comparison: same capacity costs hundreds a year, eight thousand over a decade. I cut the eight-thousand-yuan subscription down to a fifteen-hundred-yuan buyout. Big companies won’t touch this — they want the eight thousand, and fifteen hundred reads to them like slashing their own revenue. Their disdain is precisely the proof of the opening.
Someone will call it a capital-heavy grind. It’s the opposite: no warehouse, no inventory, no refurbishing center. My entire asset base is one client plus one mesh-network control plane. This is a finance business — what matters is rate, asset, cash flow — and the bet is that hardware prices keep falling.
Four essentials: cheap stable supply, accurate pricing, reliable refurbishing, working channels. In plain words: it’s the local computer shop’s business with wings bolted on.
When judging a new business, don’t ask whether the technology is new. Ask which old business hasn’t been cloudified yet.
