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The main notion of DevPay is to act "on behalf of" a user, in order to outsource billing to Amazon while using the common AWS APIs. Once a user signs up to your service using DevPay you get a custom Access and Secret Key that's bound to this user and allows you to do all S3 actions while he's billed.

Unfortunately this hasn't been introduced for EC2 - they only allow Paid AMIs and no way to start these for your users without having their AWS credentials.

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Ahhhh interesting, so it doesn't provide you with a generic payment system, but instead provides you with a way to meter content on S3 or the use of an AMI.

That's still an interesting service model, where you charge users on resource consumption rather than on a per item basis. I wonder how well this would work for an image or video processing service or other similar services.

It's been awhile since I checked, but there was also a limitation that meant you could only associate a DevPay ID with an S3-backed AMI, ruling out the more useful EBS-backed AMIs.

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