Something related: more than a decade again, I was working as a sales engineer selling an enterprise search engine. A common pricing model we publish is chargin

Something related: more than a decade again, I was working as a sales engineer selling an enterprise search engine. A common pricing model we publish is charging $X per gigabyte of search index [1]. This sounds like similar rationale, because it feels like an honest pay as you use scheme. But it's hard for customers to understand how much they would be using. And of course since it's an enterprise solution, there is heavy switching costs playing into the equation — both into our product and if they adopt it, away from it. [1] The size of search index depended on the amount of content indexed as well as heavily on the features that were turned on. E.g. pre-index search-term expansion would increase the size by a factor, and so on.