Pay per use coming to a service near you?
Image by unforth via Flickr
(recommended by Zemanta!?!?)One of the joys of growing up in a working-class neighborhood in London during the late 70s early 80s was the dealing with miserly chip shop owners who charged extra for things like ketchup and vinegar. I remember very clearly a couple of instances where I had just enough money for chips and not enough for anything to put on them. It’s the sort of thing that sticks in your throat literally and metaphorically.
On my first trip to New York, I asked for matches at a newstand and pulled out a dollar bill only to have the newsagent stare at me with amusement. In the States, it’s expected that necessary condiments, toppings, fixings, accessories and sundries are included. An experience is the sum of its parts and people don’t like having to pay for every ingredient. I think this is a cultural thing that isn’t confined to food but recent developments may see this coming under attack.
First up, in the news today, airlines are considering charging by the pound. This is on top of charging for luggage, drinks, meals and the privilege of choosing your own seat.
Second (and closer to home for this blog) you may have seen that Time Warner is testing Internet meters.
I think this is the sort of trend that is a first step towards pay-as-you-go schemes for Web services. Pay once for access then again for use. (If cable cos build the infrastructure to handle varied payments, they can act as financial providers for web service providers.) The outages at Twitter are already causing lots of people to suggest that a pay-per-tweet model may be the best solution to help them build better infrastructure.
Seems to me that the transparency in information that the Internet has enabled is now extending to transparency in costs. As web services migrate to cloud solutions like AWS, all aspects of operations can be metered. Understanding how much each customer costs is the first step towards charging each customer.
What do you think?
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