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Pricing plans FOR CONSUMERS should always be straightforward and easy to understand. This is not a consumer product. Pricing plans FOR B2B should model, as eff

Pricing plans FOR CONSUMERS should always be straightforward and easy to understand. This is not a consumer product. Pricing plans FOR B2B should model, as effectively as possible, the underlying costs -- this allows the provider to offer the lowest possible pricing for the services that cost them the least to provide, with expensive services priced accordingly. As others have mentioned on this thread, utilities are really, really good at this -- they come up with extremely complex rate plans for their largest customers that help them achieve whatever economies they are aiming for, for example incentivizing customers to provide level-loading (which is effectively what Amazon is doing in this retrieval scheme).

jack9 11y ago
> This is not a consumer product. That's a manufactured excuse for a fundamentally bad product api and pricing structure. When dropbox is more useful than AWS, amazon has screwed the pooch (which they do pretty often). Segmenting users by arbitrary circuitous logic into "consumers" (can't find a good use for it) and "enterprise" (can find a good use for it) isn't constructive. Both classes should avoid it, because it's not even an inexpensive choice, for what you get.
- manigandham 11y ago
  How is Dropbox more useful? Dropbox and AWS Glacier are vastly different products and show exactly the divide between consumer and enterprise that you say doesn't exist.
boulos 11y ago
I think the reality is that most cloud customers are approximately consumers. Some big/sophisticated customers may want precise knobs to tune their spend versus "capability" but many businesses just want you to store their data. Pricing models like Glacier's are scary as hell to any CFO, unless they're shown a plan that says "So we're going to save $XXM on this, 100% certain". Adding on your utility company meme, there are different rate schedules for residential and business customers in most places. In Cloud, I think negotiated contracts with advanced customers probably make more sense than complex, unfriendly pricing models for everyone. Big disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine.

jack9 11y ago

> This is not a consumer product. That's a manufactured excuse for a fundamentally bad product api and pricing structure. When dropbox is more useful than AWS, amazon has screwed the pooch (which they do pretty often). Segmenting users by arbitrary circuitous logic into "consumers" (can't find a good use for it) and "enterprise" (can find a good use for it) isn't constructive. Both classes should avoid it, because it's not even an inexpensive choice, for what you get.

manigandham 11y ago
How is Dropbox more useful? Dropbox and AWS Glacier are vastly different products and show exactly the divide between consumer and enterprise that you say doesn't exist.

boulos 11y ago

I think the reality is that most cloud customers are approximately consumers. Some big/sophisticated customers may want precise knobs to tune their spend versus "capability" but many businesses just want you to store their data. Pricing models like Glacier's are scary as hell to any CFO, unless they're shown a plan that says "So we're going to save $XXM on this, 100% certain". Adding on your utility company meme, there are different rate schedules for residential and business customers in most places. In Cloud, I think negotiated contracts with advanced customers probably make more sense than complex, unfriendly pricing models for everyone. Big disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine.