My current project is a cloud deployment platform similar to GAE or Heroku. I\'m

Question

My current project is a cloud deployment platform similar to GAE or Heroku. I'm trying to figure out what pricing method works best for us and the users. Assuming that I cannot currently provide a free plan, here are the options:

1) Have fully unlimited scaling (GAE-like), and charge for usage ($5 per project + x cents per CPU hour the project uses on our system, also charge a certain amount for bandwidth in/out, database storage + I/O, r/w data store, memcached, etc.)

This ends up being cheaper (around $20 for a moderately loaded website) and more "fair" for the user (pay only for what you use), but much more complicated with the many different factors that affect final price. This type of architecture is more resilient to what you throw at it, so if you get a traffic spike, it will work perfectly fine, you'll just get charged more.

2) Pay for "application readiness"/specific scalability (have a specific amount of processes per user available to accept requests, maybe $20 a month (3 cents per hour) per process), and for a specific tier of a database. No bandwidth/IO charges (within fair use, of course). Add-ons like email and memcached are extra. (Heroku-like)

This option is a lot more simple, and much easier to project costs on. However, the pricing curve is rather steep. You do end up likely paying more (probably $40-$60 a month for a moderately-loaded website), but all of those miscellaneous costs are completely abstracted.

Which would you more likely pay for? Also, is there another option I may be overlooking?

Explanation / Answer

I much prefer the first model. So many sites want to extract $x/month and some of these sites make it very difficult to unsubscribe from. Even if the first model was more expensive, I'd prefer it as I would only be paying if I had a project, in which case, justifying the cost is very easy.

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