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Comment by wubbert | Hacker News Reader

I seriously doubt this. They can make way more money billing everyone per month than by the second. They might make more from the top percent of heavy users, but I bet most users only use it less than an hour a month. There is no way that they can find a price that would be worth charging some who only a couple of minutes while also keeping it affordable for someone who uses it al day every day.

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> They can make way more money billing everyone per month than by the second.

Based on what? Obviously the price per second will be higher than a fixed monthly rate. See Lambda vs EC2 pricing for example. AWS’ whole infrastructure is pay-per-use and they’re banking.

Because you need Office even if you only use it one hour every month?

Look at the gym industry, which makes its money off people not using their memberships.

Software isn’t gym though, it can be “used” by just keeping it in the background for multiple sessions in a tab somewhere, especially if the software does some monitoring so it’s always active.

Whether this makes sense though depends on the software.

For me personally I would not terribly mind to pay Photoshop by the minute because I would need it an hour per year. That’s extra cash that Adobe now just does not see. Most professionals though would still keep paying monthly because they use it a lot.

How much are you willing to pay for your hour of usage per year? $1? $10? $100?

Is the amount of work it would take to implement a metered rate at a rate users would pay worth it to capture the people who don't use it as a regular part of their job?

We're dealing with a video streaming service and the minutely billing is interesting. We're trying to see if we can negotiate pricing, turns out it gets expensive if the app gets used hourly/entire day. -- pricing based on number of participants and archive quality/duration.

There are other options/build your own but the cost to reintegrate or quality.

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