PDS as a Service

A new public PDS has popped up in the Atmosphere. It costs $5 per month. What features could it have that would persuade you to sign up?

Here are some ideas of mine. I'd be very interested in hearing yours.

Backups

This is part of the adversarial migration story away from an evil PDS. A backup tool that's separate from your PDS could exist but it would some stuff (like private preferences, and in the future personal private data) may be missing from the backups. The PDS could dump everything to your backup location of choice.

Usage based billing

Maybe you could pay more for more storage and more lenient rate limits.

Global distribution

If you could somehow serve the read requests to your PDS around the world then globe trotting skeeters would have a snappy experience wherever they are. This is especially true if they're using apps that do proxying via the PDS, like Bluesky.

Reliability

Of course a premium PDS would need to guarantee several 9s of uptime as well as ensure that your data is never lost in a data center fire. It would need realtime replication to multiple locations, or defer to some durable storage provider.

Passkey auth, TOTP 2FA

It's 2025 and the reference PDS distribution doesn't have 2FA for some reason. If I'm paying money then it ought to be secure.

SSO

While we're on the subject of auth, why should I even need to enter my email and create a password to sign up? Let me authenticate with Google please.

Personal access tokens

Ok maybe this one really ought to be added to the AT spec, but there's nothing stopping a PDSaaS from offering more tightly scoped API tokens.

Vanity handles

The PDS could offer a choice between a set of various cool sounding dommain suffixes for your handle.

Pre-desginated successor

Sorry to get all morbid about it, but the idea is that you could nominate someone to have access to your account in the event of your untimely demise. GitHub offer this feature already, for example.

Multi tenancy

The PDSaaS could allow others to run their own PDS. Entirely managed but completely configurable by the tenant. There are multiple billing models that could be chosen; for example a sufficiently advanced PDSaaS could charge its' tenants for only what they use. Like Serverless. A Serverless Personal Data Service.