I'm one of Webscript's founders, and I was pleasantly surprised to see this here. We just launched this morning, and I'm happy to answer any questions.
* Charge whole numbers, not 4.95. No need for the confusion. Makes the service look cheap.
* Double or triple the price (to $10-15/month). $5 vs $10 is nothing to the average dev, but it halves the number of people you need to get to ramen profitable.
* Have an expensive pro plan ($99 - $299/month). With email support, etc. If nothing else, it makes the less expensive plans more attractive.
* Don't "delete" the free scripts. "Archive" them after 7 days [it's a 7-day free trial] and you can get them all back when you upgrade to pro. If someone wants to "abuse" the system by recreating their scripts every 7 days, fine.
99% of devs will be more familiar with javascript than Lua, so I'd greatly encourage supporting that.
* We'd be happy to charge more. We have nothing to go on yet but intuition, and we think $5 is the right amount.
* This is intriguing, but I think we need to find the right value to provide in order to offer something like that.
* This is actually what we do.
Also don't underestimate the value of the more expensive plan to making your $4.95 plan look cheap. A simple answer to what could be premium is contained in your terms: Make the $99/month plan suitable for use in a production environment, as web middleware or a backend, etc by relaxing restrictions and having some sort of SLA.
We think $5 is the right amount.
* Test that assumption too :). Have table 1 with free/$5, table 2 with "Free trial", $10, $199 [pro]. Track "conversion revenue" not raw conversions.
* Large customers want to know they can get help if they need it, not be stuck in the same email queue as the $5/month hobbyists :). That peace of mind is worth a few hundred a month.
* I see -- your wording on the hover tip says "deleted" (in bold) so easy to misconstrue :). If you said "archived (and reactivated when you upgrade)" I'd feel a lot more comfortable. In my head I thought "Oh, they're deleting my scripts? So I have to decide on day 6 if I want to upgrade?".
patio11's site is full of good advice for this type of thing (http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ramit-sethi-and-patrick-...).
I want you guys to charge more so you are more sustainable, and therefore I can rely on you [if you go away after a year, I have to painfully migrate away to a new provider, which isn't worth the $5/month price savings. An hour of a programmer's time spent in migration, and it'd be much more, is much more expensive than the service].
I genuinely dislike their pricing model. I'm of the belief that, if one elects to offer a free tier, that tier should be usable in the real world. I should be able to write something that makes use of that service. This one-week "time bomb" precludes any real application of the service, and effectively makes this tier a trial. I agree that deleting the scripts is a bad idea, and is likely to produce a few indignant developers who forgot to either subscribe or re-create their scripts.
[I think they have a referrer program and if you tell them that kybernetikos@gmail.com recommended it to you I get something, in case you're feeling generous.]
-Maybe a potential user who isn't exactly sure what this is doing for me.
http://blog.parse.com/2012/09/11/welcoming-cloud-code-to-the... https://cloudmine.me/docs/servercode
Also, I know Lua and value it very highly, so seeing it mentioned immediately focused my attention.
Thirdly, "free" "unlimited" "renewable 7-day" trial sounds great, and $5/month for persistent does too.
For example do those other services come with storage? I can't tell.
For parse, it looks like you need to install a command line application. Not useful if your desktop is Windoz.
I doubt anyone is going to be building huge applications on webscript.io (yet!) but for simple little things (aka weekend projects) it should work great.
Can I call one webscript from another, for modularisation? And will that "lengthen" the timeout effectively, too?
If yes, then still everything is sequential, there's no possibility of parallelism, yes?
Is there any kind of versioning of the code, apart from the possiblity to load from github you mentioned on the site?
No parallelism. What's the use case you have in mind? We didn't really intend for people to do anything CPU-intensive.
No, there's no versioning.
EDIT: s/called/killed, thanks
Nothing particular yet, just assessing the possibilities.
Also, would it be possible to somehow easily download the scripts? In the Terms, you state: "customer is solely responsible for backing up customer's application and customer content." It should be easy to download content from the `storage` object, but how about the code?
Also, it seems I can choose any subdomain for any script, so subdomains are not tied to user by design?
What is the meaning of the following sentence in Terms and Conditions: "Customer has, in the case of Content that includes computer code, accurately categorized and/or described the type, nature, uses and effects of the materials, whether requested to do so by Planet Rational or otherwise." Described/categorized where, to whom, in what categories? What materials?
We figure that copy/paste is a good enough way to get your scripts out, but if there's demand, it wouldn't be too hard for us to build an export.
Once you create a subdomain, you own it, but you can have whichever ones you choose. (There's no overall subdomain for a user... a user can have as many subdomains as he/she wants.)
A lawyer wrote the Terms, not me, and I probably shouldn't try to interpret them. If you want to discuss it, send us email (support@webscript.io) and we'll help.
A number of people are mentioning JavaScript. We don't have any plans yet, but we're paying attention to the feedback.