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Ask HN: Billing for atomized pricing?

8 points by chexton ↗ HN
My business partner and I have recently observed that a growing number of web services seem to be moving toward 'atomized' business models instead of a typical flat-rate subscription model.

A simple example of this is Amazon with their cloud solutions: they bill you in extremely small increments depending on your usage.

We are currently considering building what could be described as the Recurly or Chargify for atomized payments as neither of these handle the exact use case I'm talking about.

As many members of HN would be part of the initial target market and will of course have many interesting thoughts, does anyone here have a need for such a product? If so, feel free to leave your email at http://atompay.semblancesystems.com so we can give you updates!

General discussion also welcome: Do you think more SaaS businesses will follow this model in the future? What other solutions have you seen in the wild?

4 comments

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mwotton
I'm interested in this for ninjablocks, too - I think we're currently bundling a small number of resources (SMSes etc) with each account, but then perhaps more fine-grained tracking.
chexton
Cool. How about we talk about it face-to-face :).
mwotton
good idea - i might even manage a complete and coherent sentence.
alangjones
Any time I'm paying only for what I consume (atomized) I'm happier than when I'm stuck in a slot in a pricing table somebody created with very little idea about which features I really need, how many users I need and how much of the service I need to consume per month.

But coding atomized pricing for a platform is often much harder than coding a price/feature table so anything that offered atomized billing as a service (ABaaS?) would be great.