Attention: We are retiring the ASP.NET Community Blogs. Learn more >

Amazon EC2 and 'Pay As You Go Applications'

Just in case you never heard of Amazon EC2, go here first.

Right now, they charge you for the time the server is up and the consumed bandwidth. They provide 'Pay As You Go Hosting'.

I think Amazon is quite close to enable 'Pay As You Go Applications' if they support some kind of revenue-sharing model.

For example, suppose I built a web-based CRM application, and I'm selling it through my website. My customer pays me $5.000, he downloads the application, install it in his server and run it.

What if my customer can host it in Amazon EC2 and instead of charging him 0.10 per hour / 0.20 per GB they charge him 0.15/hour 0.25/GB and pay me 0.05/hour and 0.05/GB? The customer, instead of paying me $5.000 for my CRM, he'll pay depending on how much he uses it.

Now we have 'Pay As You Go Applications'. I think it opens a new world of interesting business models.

   

2 Comments

  • Hi Fred,

    Actually, I think it will be much better if they do the billing.

    They have something similar with the zShops/Marketplace, and they make very clear that they are not buying from amazon.com if you buy from the zShops.



  • Pay as you go is just dumb. Lots of software that gets sold (or books or videos, or widgets) don't get used (sometimes never or sometimes years or months). They sit on the shelf. The idea is to sell a product through marketing and make a good buck. Hopefully, the software is top notch, so the user got what he/she paid for. But, pay as you go is just ridiculous.

Comments have been disabled for this content.