charging subscribers and slowing free users enough

[Robert Smart]

What I'd like to do sounds so normal that maybe someone has done it and wants to share:

I plan to have free users and subscribers. Free users will see ads, but subscribers can opt out of that. What I want to do is

a) Charge subscribers enough to cover their usage (plus profit) and be able to show them their usage and how it relates to google charges. Subscribers can pay as much or as little as they like at any time, but they have to stay ahead (like prepay phones), or go back to being free users.

b) Allow free users, but slow them up enough so that total free usage doesn't get above free quota (plus whatever advertising revenue might support). Once again I want to give the users the info they need about how much they are being slowed up and why, and how much it would cost them to be a subscriber.

Thanks in advance for any help.

rks

[Tristan]

You actually need do the numbers for this and work it out for
yourself. When you have a free user, how much computation / storage
space are they going to use? Figure out what their usage is per day.
So say, 0.0001 GB storage, 0.01 CPU hour will end up with $0.002 for
storage and $0.08 for cpu per DAY. Which is $0.082 per day per free
user. If you have 10,000 free users it costs you $820 per day. Or
$24,600 per month. There's no mechanism to "slow down" free users that
won't take up computing resources anyway. It doesn't take that much to
do 0.01 CPU hour / day of computation per user.

Don't get caught up in "free quota" because it becomes insignificant
as soon as you exceed it. For example, it takes 650 users to do 0.01
CPU hour worth of computation to exceed your free quota. So even
allowing for that, 10,000 - 650 = 9,350 -> $23,001 per month. Not much
difference in my opinion.

Cheers

On Jun 21, 11:24 pm, Robert Smart <robert.kenneth.sm...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Tristan]

Uhm... I think I moved some decimal points around (although it looks
like I just made up a bunch of stuff .. lol... sorry, I even double
checked :) )

0.01 CPU hour * $0.10 / CPU hour = $0.001 per day per user
0.0001 GB * $0.005 / GB = $0.0000005 per day per user

$0.001 + $0.0000005 => $0.001 per day per user

10,000 free users * $0.001 per day per user = $10 per day

$10 per day * 30 days / month = $300 per month

Again free CPU quota is 6.50 CPU hours

650 * 0.01 CPU hour = 6.50 CPU hours, so 650 users still use up your
quota

9,350 free users * $0.001 per day per user = $9.35 per day

$9.35 per day * 30 days / month = $280.5 per month

So it's much more accessible.. which of course is the case..

But it's still a real cost, 100,000 free users will be around $3,000
per month that will need to be covered.