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Comment by patrickg_zill | Hacker News Reader

They are making money at multiple points:

1. Charging you per-minute for use of the service.

2. Charging you a per-DID fee per day of use. Why? You are already paying for the service, and for the VOIP termination. BTW at Amazon scale, the DID numbers are either free or less than 10 cents/month per DID.

3. Charging you (in the USA at least) for the actual VOIP calling.

With 1) and 3), a USA call costs you 0.0048 cents per minute on inbound. Under usual circumstances, inbound calls to USA numbers are free.

They will also (should you request it) record the calls and store them in S3...

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It's worth noting that, at that scale, you actually get PAID for inbound calls. At MagicJack, the cost of our went into the negative because of access fees. Even though Amazon is not a carrier (yet), they will likely work a deal to get paid.

Vonage does the same thing. They receive a revenue share of the access charges from level 3.

> They will also (should you request it) record the calls and store them in S3...

My first thought was this was a way to get an enormous amount of recording call information to train the AI inside of Amazon.

Is this pricing that unusual? Almost all the other products I've looked into had pricing plans where you pay a per user license, plus the cost of a DID and usage. A couple offered just per user license, but when you did the math you could have people to be on the phone for 10 hours a day before you started saving vs per minute prices

Yes it is very unusual in this industry. As a matter of fact, it is so unusual that it will continue to exist for the foreseeable future since most companies depend heavily on the licensing model to survive. It's the heart of their operation - changing it would most likely have an adverse impact on their business.

But, it is going away with companies like Fenero, and now Amazon Connect, leading the way.

Amazon Connect has a lot of catching up to do since it is no where near the feature set required to run a real contact center (it can't even support blended agents or call outcome dispositioning and reporting!)

I totally understand why Amazon Connect may seem like a big deal for those of you outside of the space, or that aren't real close to the various advanced technological capabilities in this industry.

Check out this analysis for more: http://blog.fenero.com/amazon-connect-is-not-only-over-price...

Thats why we have removed per agent pricing and charge only for minutes[1]. After some scale, it might make sense to go for fixed agent rental. But to start of,its better to have no agent pricing.

[1] http://getkookoo.com/getting-saas-pricing-right-pricing-clou...

> They will also (should you request it) record > the calls and store them in S3...

The world's largest collection of customer service phonecalls might make an interesting training corpus for ML/AI projects.

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