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Comment by moe | Hacker News Reader

This is easily one of the worst pricing pages I have ever seen.

Your pricing scheme is extraordinarily complex and the page does the poorest possible job at explaining anything. Heck, it doesn't even mention that RAM is your discriminator - it simply implies it as if that was natural.

Moreover none of the terms are explained (what is "Vertical Scaling", what is "Proportional to application memory")...

There is not even a calculator/slider to get a rough idea of actual cost without engaging in Excel-gymnastics.

You should seriously get outside help for this.

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Hi moe, thanks for the feedback,

I suppose it's the elastic nature of the pricing that you find complex? I can't disagree with you, it is less straightforward than flat monthly plans. However it is what litteraly thousands of developers have been asking us for over the last year. Our previous pricing was focused on simplicity... but ended up sweeping the reality of our product under tbe rug.

I think you're right that we don't explain enough on the pricing page. Our concern was text overload., but there's probably a balance to be found.

What about the content - any opinion on our actual pricing?

Imho you need sliders, like Heroku.

But that's just my gut reaction. What you really need is a webdesigner who can lay down an approachable visualization for such a complex pricing scheme (which will probably involve sliders, and also big honking tooltips).

As for your actual pricing - I don't know. It wasn't obvious from the page what a small/medium/large deployment would cost and I didn't bother to fire up excel to figure out a number that you should absolutely spoon-feed me.

Did you notice we offer real-life usage scenarios at the bottom of the page?

I saw them but those are but single datapoints (and apps seems to vary wildly in requirements). would be handy to have a slider so you could answer the 'what-ifs'. also, was an early beta signup, really liked dotcloud, but have to agree this pricing is pretty complicated :(

Yes, but as lalmalang said, these are not very useful and not discoverable at all.

I don't want to click through 5+ random scenarios to perhaps find one that comes close to what I have in mind.

Well, at the risk of repeating myself. You seem to be generating revenue already, so I would seriously look into hiring a designer for this (or make a contest or such).

My gut feeling is that you're so deep into all this (which is generally good!) that you have a hard time reviewing it through the eyes of a first-time visitor.

Not the elastic nature, more that it takes longer than it should to understand what the drivers are. If everything is related to memory and memory only goes up in 32MB chunks, have a slider/radio/dropdown/whatever that moves memory and related resources simultaneously, with a per-hour and monthly charge that's auto-updated.

I think it's important to note that the page is about pricing, but 99% of the info isn't a price. Above the fold there's only one price, which you have to use in calculating the actual value yourself. Way, way down are the examples, but they might or might not represent what a customer's workload will look like, so they still don't really have what they came to the page for. Getting the customer their own price, super-fast, (assuming it's a good one) is the path to showing why you guys are so fantastic.

All good feedback. However the one giant caveat is that most developers don't know how much memory their application needs.

Most people don't know how much disk space an email takes, it didn't stop Gmail from just giving 2gb free disk space.

Yes - exactly like dotCloud's sandbox :)

Except Gmail isn't just free for drafting emails, it is free when you send them to real people too.

dotCloud doesn't have ads, to pay for the service like gmail. :)

But 2gb sounds like a lot and 32mb sounds like nothing. When a service like rackspace _starts_ at 256mb you wonder just what you are getting.

What you're getting is the ability to deploy linux containers with very fine-grained control over resource allocation. Maybe you're using redis as a job queue, or to hold a handful of counters. Maybe you're running nginx to serve static assets with custom rewrite rules. You can run it dotCloud and pay peanuts - knowing that you're one "dotcloud scale" away from all the gigabytes of ram you can eat.

That's why you (in addition to all that has been said) should make very clear how easy it is to up- and downgrade.

Also there could be small hints next to the slider (yes, I'm a fan of sliders;)) as it snaps into the various positions...

But those are again just ideas. You should get a good designer on the case, this is their bread & butter.

That's easily solved

Have a slider. When you move it have a window that lists what applications can be served with the selected allotment.

Hell... that'd be pretty damn cool looking

I wouldn't say it's the worst, but it's pretty poor.

The page doesn't mention whether it's per day, month, or year for example, but they seem to be taking feedback from a couple of the other comments.

Not sure why you've been downvoted for this, seems a bit harsh.

i agree. i can't figure out this pricing. a simple slider like Heroku or Pagodabox would be much easier.

I can't get the examples to come out right. Looking at the 3rd one for $172.80, if i get out my calculator and crunch, it looks like it should be $112.32 to me.

(256 x 1) + (448 x 1) + (128 x 1) = 832 total MB RAM

at $0.006 per 32MB ram per hour you get $4.32 per month per each block of 32 MB

832 / 32 = 26 blocks of 32 MB RAM

26 x 4.32 = $112.32

what am i doing wrong here?

You're right the math is wrong on that one, but it isn't the only thing wrong. SSL is 160MB not 128MB. We will double check the numbers and fix it.

Thanks for pointing that out.

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