5 ms·

I can imagine this driving providers to work around that, structuring their service such that they can argue the user is still engaging with the service passive

by gnode 9y ago

I can imagine this driving providers to work around that, structuring their service such that they can argue the user is still engaging with the service passively. For example, having data stored on their servers is use (as I may later want to use it, and incurs them a cost to store it). Or, perhaps being emailed updates about my credit score could be regarded as engagement as they can't necessarily tell whether I am reading their emails.

threeseed 9y ago
> I can imagine this driving providers to work around that And those providers will be punished by consumers for it. One angry customer can cause all sorts of damage.
woolvalley 9y ago
For some SaaS businesses although, such as dropbox & google drive, their most of their business is storage. It would be hard to blame those kinds of services to keep on billing you even if you don't look at the data most of the time.
- gnode 9y ago
  Pretty much all SaaS businesses have storage as significant factor. Office 365 has documents; DocuSign has contracts; Salesforce has customer information. Even if it's not a significant amount of data in commodity storage terms, the storage and handling of that data is central to the service.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  That's different. Storage is 'in use' when you're using it, period. But when you have a dropbox subscription and you don't use your storage then that should not be charged imo.
  - sah2ed 9y ago
    I think it's much more subtle. It might be better to separate the two use cases as: "data at rest" and "data in use" like Amazon does with S3 where they charge separately for storage and transfer costs. If you do not access your data stored on S3 throughout a billing period, your invoice will only reflect those costs -- your usage costs will be stated as $0 for that month.

5 ms·

I can imagine this driving providers to work around that, structuring their service such that they can argue the user is still engaging with the service passive

by gnode 9y ago

threeseed 9y ago
> I can imagine this driving providers to work around that And those providers will be punished by consumers for it. One angry customer can cause all sorts of damage.
woolvalley 9y ago
For some SaaS businesses although, such as dropbox & google drive, their most of their business is storage. It would be hard to blame those kinds of services to keep on billing you even if you don't look at the data most of the time.
- gnode 9y ago
  Pretty much all SaaS businesses have storage as significant factor. Office 365 has documents; DocuSign has contracts; Salesforce has customer information. Even if it's not a significant amount of data in commodity storage terms, the storage and handling of that data is central to the service.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  That's different. Storage is 'in use' when you're using it, period. But when you have a dropbox subscription and you don't use your storage then that should not be charged imo.
  - sah2ed 9y ago
    I think it's much more subtle. It might be better to separate the two use cases as: "data at rest" and "data in use" like Amazon does with S3 where they charge separately for storage and transfer costs. If you do not access your data stored on S3 throughout a billing period, your invoice will only reflect those costs -- your usage costs will be stated as $0 for that month.