11 ms·

Longbet: By 2027, software will be metered/sold by the second

79 points by collegeburner 5y ago

bhouston 5y ago
Autodesk Flex where you pay by the day is in this spirit. I actually like this model for infrequently used software.
- anonymoushn 5y ago
  Right, it certainly seems nicer than paying monthly for Adobe CC so I can open Photoshop once every 3 months.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
spacemanmatt 5y ago
How long has AWS been selling compute by the second?
- kgwxd 5y ago
  Yeah but that's mostly for stuff that's supposed to always be available, like web services. I'll be damned if I'm going to start worrying about leaving my PC on because my OS charges by the second, or leaving certain windows open, or what background tasks are running. No only would it be unmanageable, it be a constant source of tension no one would want in their lives.
- jaza 5y ago
  But who does AWS make the most money from? Those with cloud-native solutions, running almost entirely on lambda and dynamodb? Or those who have lift-and-shift-ed legacy solutions, running almost entirely on reserved EC2 and RDS instances? AWS has been saying for yonks that they'd love for all their customers to be cloud-native and to pay less. But they must be banking on many of their customers (especially the enterprise / government ones) not actually making that switch anytime soon.
  - emteycz 5y ago
    EC2 instance costs the same whether I use its RAM or not (these resources are sold as spot instances). I pay for Lambda only when it executes and only exactly for what I used.
    - mushyhammer 5y ago
      Sometimes that works out in your favor, others it doesn’t. Lambda minutes are far more expensive than EC2’s
    - drunkpotato 5y ago
      While true, it's not the whole story. lambda is also approximately 1000x more expensive than EC2. So if your lambda is only running 0.1% of the time or less (12 seconds per every 3 hours 20 minutes) you break even. If it runs more than that, lambda is more expensive. This is just price comparison. There are other reasons, convenience, visibility, integration with other services, to choose lambda sometimes and EC2 other times. It's important to profile and know what your use case is!
      - vlovich123 5y ago
        Source on the price comparison? Or did you mean that Lambda is 1000x cheaper than EC2 [1][2]? It's obviously load dependent but functions-style code is going to typically be cheaper than even the smallest EC2 instance while handling more load (provided your RAM/CPU usage fits within the envelope it's optimized around). Disclaimer: I work at Cloudflare on R2 and Workers is even cheaper than Lambda@Edge (provided your workload fits within the compute envelope). Billing is based on CPU time not wall time [3]. Workers Bundled pricing can be more cost effective in some cases if you only need <= 50ms of compute. [1] https://lumigo.io/blog/aws-lambda-vs-ec2/ https://lumigo.io/blog/aws-lambda-vs-ec2/ [2] https://www.trek10.com/blog/lambda-cost https://www.trek10.com/blog/lambda-cost [3] https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-workers-unbound/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-workers-unbound/
- charcircuit 5y ago
  About 4 and a half years.
- paxys 5y ago
  The vast majority of AWS revenue comes from fixed-price multi-year reserve contracts. Billing by the second/minute/hour really only happens for hobbyists and small fish.
  - spacemanmatt 5y ago
    AWS do not mess around with price tiers and cost breaks for customers who can commit to some resources for a year or more, and I'm sure those will also be their bigger institutional customers. I think you nailed it.
SmooL 5y ago
So, if I keep my word document open on my computer and start doing other things, I still get billed? Not sure end users will like this or think it's easier.
- alexb_ 5y ago
  The way I see the future of computing: You have what basically amounts to a keyboard, a screen, and a wifi chip, so that it can be sold at astonishingly low prices. No excess memory, no excess processing power, because all memory and storage will be rented out or extracted for data collection. Privacy will become a thing of the past since everything you do passes through a corporation that's doing the real computing. You will own absolutely none of your data or your programs, you are beholden to the whims of a corporation that can raise prices whenever they feel like, and it will become the norm because "wow cool $90 computer that can run any program". People will absolutely buy inferior products if it's cheap enough and marketed well enough.
  - shawnz 5y ago
    Based on historical trends it seems more likely to me that $90 computers of the future will simply be able to run the most advanced consumer software locally and thin clients will just be unnecessary complexity.
    - disposedtrolley 5y ago
      The hardware will probably have the capabilities to do so, but I can see consumer software reaching a point where much of the compute is performed remotely, and we're just being streamed a rendered interface.
      - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
        If the hardware has the capability of doing all my calculations locally, then why would I want to do it all remotely and just receive a rendered interface? So that I can have the "added convenience" of having my software unavailable during the occasional network outage? And the pleasure of network latency, even when there isn't an outage?
cassonmars 5y ago
I don’t doubt this at all, but I suspect it will extend to all aspects of software, including the OS — it is the inevitable state of full decentralization. However, I expect also that the usage of software in being metered will also be countered by in-kind contributions, in that the power you feed back to the decentralized grid will compensate your use of the software you need. Disclaimer: I am working on exactly this notion of a decentralized PaaS
henning 5y ago
Restating your claim is not an argument, even if you tack on that it is "inevitable" without any evidence or actual argument to support that claim. The answer to future shitty software that sucks ass is to use or write different software. I understand that lots of companies use Outlook/Exchange and won't switch anytime soon.
- cassonmars 5y ago
  I think you meant to reply in thread to me since I was the only commenter that said “inevitable” before your post. That being said, I said this was the inevitable state of full decentralization, not that full decentralization was an inevitability. I cannot speak to how the market will ultimately decide on this topic, but I can build towards it as I believe it to be an ideal state in that the computing power of the world is currently sub-optimally used and reaching an equilibrium would be beneficial overall.
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    The word "inevitable" is from the Longbet prediction itself > "... In five years, it will be metered by the nanosecond to end users. This is not only predictable, but inevitable." And that's the extent of the rationale for the prediction. The right thing to do when people insist their unfounded conclusions are "inevitable" is to take their money, but that's not an option here (the Long Now foundation keeps what they make on investing any "bet" for the duration, and the capital is paid to a charity of the winner's choice).
    - cassonmars 5y ago
      Fair, I missed the word inevitable in their prediction. I do personally believe it to be an inevitability, hence my investing my free time, energy and money into being a part of shaping that future. Ultimately any prediction in technology is defined by the whim of the market, so either my belief is correct and I can help in creating that future in a fairer way than some hyper-PaaS which does not impart an ability to earn or be an active part of that market segment (a future where AWS _is_ the core of computing is a terrifying future to me), or I am wrong, but the cryptography and distributed computing research I'm investing my time into will have beneficial uses regardless.
squarefoot 5y ago
In other words, computers will be sold like printers and software will be sold like ink cartridges.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  Can someone on Hacker News please just win a lottery and start a decent printer company? Call it "Ethical Printing Corporation" (EPiC) and make something that doesn't take a million drivers, have no replacement parts, break after two years, and require those darn proprietary cartridges in a million variations.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    I have to say almost every major printer company now has models with ink tanks in the printer which you can just fill with a bottle. The printers are sold at a premium but I think the price for the hardware is more realistic. I'm glad to see this development
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    It is really notable that there are successful open source, modular or standardised 3D printers but the projects to produce an equivalent document printer have struggled. Printers appear to be an unusual niche in that everyone needs them cheaply, but they also need to be highly precise to print documents and graphics well. So you have these cheap devices that pull off something very difficult -- thousands of tiny tiny droplets of ink per inch, precisely aligned, again and again, very quickly. But with plastic shells, mass-produced injection-moulded mechanics, and a few high cost, enclosed components. This is why they tend to have no replaceable parts, and integrated print heads. Because user-replaceable parts mean human-level tolerances, not factory machine tolerances, and human-level tolerances mean badly calibrated prints. In short, nobody wants to have to learn to tune their document printer the way everyone with a 3D printer expects to have to do. There are a few things that your EPC printer could focus on -- standardised ink delivery, standardised print heads, modular linear rails. But it will be difficult because it is difficult to solve for all of those things cheaply. If we could go back to e.g. the limitations of a golfball printer, we'd have ethical/open/modular implementations left, right and centre. Otherwise, be careful what you wish for, unless you really want to tinker with your printer.
gjsman-1000 5y ago
I doubt this will happen for regular consumers mainly because per-second billing is overly complicated and potentially easy to fake by editing the amount of seconds downward; and also because companies often have subscribers who never touch their software each month but remain subscribed, and those customers would be worth nothing if we switched.
JonChesterfield 5y ago
Claim is limited to "essential enterprise software". Submission title would be more accurate if "enterprise" was added to it.
ohCh6zos 5y ago
What can we, as developers, do to take back computing and move it to being more free and less commercial?
- akomtu 5y ago
  Form a "software engineering association" with fees paying for full time lawyers and lobbyists and try to pass laws that would prevent the scenario above. But expect a very organised and well funded opposition: the anti-privacy trends have big sponsors at the top.
- bediger4000 5y ago
  Don't develop for Windows, or MacOS for that matter. If your OS is uncontrolled, so is the software.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  Don't be a developer as a profession, and that'll pretty quickly resolve the need to be paid for software you create. I guess you'd also not be allowed to value your time or effort, either.
- contravariant 5y ago
  Same thing as always, make better free and non-commercial software.
- sz3 5y ago
  At the risk of being reductive: Make more of our software copyleft? Even weak copyleft? As a thought experiment, imagine how the modern web might've played out if KHTML was released under the MIT license instead of the LGPL? Bearing in mind: Google has other ways of controlling the market (search, android, youtube, gmail, "switch to chrome" everywhere... don't call it anti-competitive...), but they've had to work much harder to exert control than they would've -- IMO -- if blink/webkit/khtml had a more "corporate friendly" license. Maybe I'm off base with my reasoning, but I see it as being about friction. We can't stop the inhuman profit-seeking machine from doing what it does, but we do have some (underutilized) tools to slow it down.
- 5y ago
dboreham 5y ago
Definitely wrong. Vendors like predictable revenue. Pricing based on actual usage doesn't provide this.
- TillE 5y ago
  Yeah, the ideal is to get customers (business or consumer) on a monthly subscription regardless of how much they use the software. There's just no advantage to this in the vast majority of cases.
  - ramoz 5y ago
    Ideal is multi-year for enterprise software
  - pbuzbee 5y ago
    Yes, to me this incentivizes customers to use your software as little as possible, which seems like the opposite of what you would want to encourage: lock in.
- mushyhammer 5y ago
  Is AWS the proof you’re wrong or just the exception?
  - bawolff 5y ago
    In aws, if you aren't using it someone else could be. With SAAS office software, this is not the case or at least capacity is much more divorced from usage.
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    AWS isn't a software product as defined in the post though. It goes more along the lines of Office 365 or Adobe's tools, but those are just standard subscriptions and I doubt that'll change any time soon.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    The difference with AWS (eg EC2) is the people who run their workload in a few hours on an instance is the minority. Most people are going to have a base amount of servers. The hourly billing tries to encourage customers to spend more to scale their resources with demand of their service. Maybe having an extra N nodes on stand by isn't affordable for a customer, but you they could afford those extra N nodes during peak hours.
wubbert 5y ago
I seriously doubt this. They can make way more money billing everyone per month than by the second. They might make more from the top percent of heavy users, but I bet most users only use it less than an hour a month. There is no way that they can find a price that would be worth charging some who only a couple of minutes while also keeping it affordable for someone who uses it al day every day.
- mushyhammer 5y ago
  > They can make way more money billing everyone per month than by the second. Based on what? Obviously the price per second will be higher than a fixed monthly rate. See Lambda vs EC2 pricing for example. AWS’ whole infrastructure is pay-per-use and they’re banking.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    Because you need Office even if you only use it one hour every month? Look at the gym industry, which makes its money off people not using their memberships.
    - mushyhammer 5y ago
      Software isn’t gym though, it can be “used” by just keeping it in the background for multiple sessions in a tab somewhere, especially if the software does some monitoring so it’s always active. Whether this makes sense though depends on the software. For me personally I would not terribly mind to pay Photoshop by the minute because I would need it an hour per year. That’s extra cash that Adobe now just does not see. Most professionals though would still keep paying monthly because they use it a lot.
      - saalweachter 5y ago
        How much are you willing to pay for your hour of usage per year? $1? $10? $100? Is the amount of work it would take to implement a metered rate at a rate users would pay worth it to capture the people who don't use it as a regular part of their job?
alkonaut 5y ago
Doubt it. Not for office. But for niche software like specialty engineering software etc this is already the case. In the case of the software I build for a living the billing granularity is minutes (and this is for traditional heavy desktop software not some web SaaS).
- ccakes 5y ago
  Super interesting! Can you share the name of the software?
  - akoster 5y ago
    IIRC while on an internship at Broadcom, lots of EDA tools were utilized by sending a script to a (Sun Solaris?) grid compute cluster to save on license costs or due to licenses being billed per minute or cpu-minute. I do recall some internal "wall of shame" dashboard listing users with the most (idle?) minutes using an EDA tool.
    - not2b 5y ago
      It is more likely that the company has a fixed number of licenses for some product, and is using a grid to maximize the amount of work they get out of those licenses. That is the usual practice with expensive EDA software, to the extent that the vendors will help customers set it up.
  - d_t_w 5y ago
    Not the OP but our product falls into the 'specialty engineering software' category. We build an enterprise ready tool for teams working with Apache Kafka (https://kpow.io https://kpow.io) and offer an hourly price. The deliverable is a single docker container (not a desktop app!) and right from the start, nearly three years now, we've been selling on the AWS Marketplace for 0.16c/hr: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-5jvke6codhrsm https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-5jvke6codhrsm We have a couple of pricing models, but on the consumption based model we stick to that clear, transparent hourly price. It's good for customers that choose that model, and good for us because we're engineers and we don't care for opaque enterprise sales practices. We do a fair number of enterprise sales too, they require a negotiation because metering usage at an enterprise level is rarely practical. Even then the price is some calculation of usage/value + support. Keeps it simple, lets us attack a big market as a small team and stay focused on technical delivery, shortens the sale/negotiation time, and our customers know they're basically paying the same price as anyone else.
catsarebetter 5y ago
The point of frequent pricing like subscription is to create stability in the business, probably once a month for software is based off of the financial cycles. Maybe in some decentralized world lol.
annoyingnoob 5y ago
Then it will be like the Bell Companies all over again, but with data/processing instead of voice.
amalcon 5y ago
Metering software by the second seems worse for both the developer (whose revenue becomes less predictable than e.g. monthly billing) and the typical customer (who now needs to think about whether the particular document they want to write warrants paying for Office, or whether it's fine to just do it in GDocs or LibreOffice). It benefits someone who just uses Excel for a short time to do their budgeting each month (because it saves them money), but it also decreases the value of that customer so much that Microsoft probably doesn't care that they get (wild guess) 5x as many of them.
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  It would make sense in fringe cases, but not for mainstream use. Purchasing access to exclusive content with pre-paid minutes is not a new thing after all, but most people want either buy-once-pay-once or "manageable monthly/annual rate", not a highly variable and potentially very spendy financial timebomb ticking away on their computers.
whateveracct 5y ago
mine won't
deleted 5y ago
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mbroshi 5y ago
I see a lot of doubters, but the bet is still open. If you're so doubtful, go ahead and put your money where your mouth is!
- stubish 5y ago
  It isn't a bet. It is a donation to charity with the hassle of going through a registration process.
lumost 5y ago
This will depend heavily on the use case. Generally, you want your users to be as engaged with your software as possible - meaning they actively use it as often as possible. If you charge per second then they will find alternatives, they’ll have to think of ways to pause and resume the software when they are in between tasks. This adds real costs and disincentives for the customer to use your product. When they compare billing to a per user license, they might perceive the per user license as lower cost.
deleted 5y ago
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awinter-py 5y ago
expect something more like open source platforms + file formats, commercially licensed plugins for non-commodity pieces of the puzzle office <-> avid is a pretty broad spectrum. I'm sure there are ways in which office is not a commodity available for free on every platform, and as a libreoffice user I feel the limitations of libreoffice sometimes, but office software is mostly a commodity. video + graphics software OTOH doesn't have a strong oss contender IMO also unclear how AI will change the game -- will we sell software or trained models. will plugins from different training sets be 'incompatible' in some way that favors one-stop-shop vendors
ilaksh 5y ago
I was actually just planning on charging per four hour block for my Algorand Python IDE. Because the fees are tiny it is feasible.
- neysofu 5y ago
  Link?
  - ilaksh 5y ago
    Maybe in the next month or so.
armchairhacker 5y ago
Longbet: most popular software becomes completely free. Paid software simply can't compete and companies are better off getting their money through other means. However you are paying for the energy required to run the software, and energy prices may also spike and become non-negligable. So technically, you are paying by the second.
stubish 5y ago
Charging by the hour is a great way of making users minimize use of your software. This is exactly not what you want your users to do. Some idiot will try this, but will quickly learn and revert or go under. Especially dumb with something like MS Office where the whole system is designed to keep users in the system 24x7 and reliant, rather than encourage alternate solutions for bits and pieces. Slash your software licensing costs by pasting text from notepad rather than typing it in MS Office, survive this months budget cuts, eventually realize you can do without the software entirely.
- tobyjsullivan 5y ago
  You could make the same argument about per-user pricing. And you wouldn't be wrong.
  - enraged_camel 5y ago
    This is true, per user pricing can result in stuff like customers sharing user accounts. Although it’s easier to counter that effect with per user pricing by adding things like audit logs, which are very valuable (and even required) in some industries.
- friedturkey 5y ago
  > Some idiot will try this, but will quickly learn and revert or go under. Or, more than likely, every major software company in a certain domain will coincidentally release metered software in the same time period and small indie developers will be trying to compete with products that have 30+ years of familiarity (and not really succeeding). Then other software industries will adopt the system within months and it'll be inescapable. This is precisely what happened with subscription services.
bArray 5y ago
> In five years, it will be metered by the nanosecond to end users. This is not only predictable, but inevitable. The only people working at nanosecond precision are likely to want a long-term project budget to allow for budget planning. > [..] specifically MS Office for business and Avid Pro Tools for film, will be metered in seconds, rather than distributed in a sales or monthly subscription model. Businesses have budgets to manage, and those are typically allocated on the order of months or years. Not only this, but the seconds interacted with these pieces of software would incentivize users to keep closing them, breaking workflow. I suspect we will see more license pools shared at companies for expensive software, with the possibility of pulling out additional licenses on-the-fly at an additional cost. On the other hand, an industry that may want per-minute billing is lawyers, who typically bill their clients per minute. That said, it's hardly worth the effort and is just considered part of the operational overhead of an employee. Metering hardware by the minute makes way more sense though, as is roughly correlates with wear. Things like electric scooters now charge per minute. But this is essentially the taxi model and this is obvious.
not2b 5y ago
And any programmer who finds an optimization that makes existing code run 10% faster will be fired, for costing the company 10% of revenue.
deleted 5y ago
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Kabie 5y ago
Human seconds or CPU seconds?
paxys 5y ago
Nope, won't happen. In fact, their argument is straight-up incorrect: > The first software was designed for, or sold to individual hardware manufacturers and distributed free with the hardware. In the next stage it was sold directly to end users. Next, it was sold under a subscription model to end users. In five years, it will be metered by the nanosecond to end users. This is not only predictable, but inevitable. The kind of software they are talking about (operating systems, word processors and other enterprise productivity software) was never given out for free, and the volume sold directly to end users was (and is) negligible. It was always a per-user license negotiated between sales and procurement teams since back when business software first became a thing, and will be so for the foreseeable future.
mattmaroon 5y ago
I don’t have much input on whether the gist of this is solid or not but it’s a very poorly structured wager. I can see unlimited ways in which the outcome could be disputed, such as Microsoft having tiers of office with different names, all of which don’t match what is listed and some charging that way and some not. This favors the challenger because they’re more likely to get a clear win. If I were this person I’d do a lot of clarification. Also why avid pro tools? That choice of something so niche makes me feel like the author knows something on that one.
Zachsa999 5y ago
Am I alone in hating cloud software? You gotta wait for the service to come back online, you lose a bunch of screen real estate, the context menu is slow and unpredictable. Obviously there is benefits, but couldn't networking be easily built into desktop apps as well?
- paxys 5y ago
  What is "cloud software"? I use Office 365 and it doesn't have any of the problems that you describe.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    The desktop version of O365 isn't really cloud software. It doesn't run in the cloud, it just stores its files there if you choose to do so, and checks it's licences there. The web version is, but it does have a lot of drawbacks.
eternityforest 5y ago
There's apparently an escape game control software that charges by the minute
Aeolun 5y ago
Hah, I feel safe challenging this. If I am somehow wrong, I’ll happily pay up (and lament the way the world has gone).
jrm4 5y ago
This is literally the dumbest idea I've ever seen on the front page of Hacker News. Now, I'm not saying it's 100% impossible. But if it happens, (ever), we can effectively declare "general purpose computing" dead.
ofou 5y ago
I'd pay per match on Tinder though
gverrilla 5y ago
annual subscription payments are a much safer bet also in the long future a lot will be just free
ivanche 5y ago
Dozens of commenters disagreeing here yet still no challengers on Longbets site…
ksec 5y ago
Vast majority ( if not All ) of the HN reply seems to be betting against it. Let me be the usual contrarian. The message is very specific about business software, not any software ( as the headline suggest ), I actually think this isn't so bad provided the following: You get freemium usage every month. In that case, everyone gets to use Microsoft Office for free. And that is a huge lock in if it isn't already. You have caps, just like AWS, the cap will be cheaper than actually billing per second. The subscription per month stays in place. Because companies like OpeX, but the usage model gives them a lot of flexibility. Especially in terms of cross selling to other software within the same company. The only problem is I only see this being possible if the software is run on server and streamed to clients. Otherwise I dont see how they could meter it and we are just back to the old crackz or warez era.
- ryathal 5y ago
  This basically already exists with Azure functions/AWS Lamda. The missing step is just converting the cloud bill x profit to the end consumer.
WheelsAtLarge 5y ago
There's a trend of manufacturing scarcity for bits. Users don't like it but companies will use it as a way to goose earnings. Once a company finds a way to do it then all other companies will start to do it. We've started to see something similar with all the paywalls that have gone up in the last decade. A good example are wireless companies. Cell phone companies could have gone the unlimited subscription model route many years ago but yet they continue to limit the use. It's not a straight per minute model but you can divide the monthly charges by the minutes and it works out the same way. The way to fight it is to go open source and the expansion of community projects like Wikipedia and such. But getting people to do work for the public good without compensation in the long term is next to impossible. Charging by the period of time is coming. I'm 100% sure.
tsunamifury 5y ago
It’s already sold by the second via compute. It just is repacked then sold in a subscription down the line for accounting ease.

79 points by collegeburner 5y ago

bhouston 5y ago

Autodesk Flex where you pay by the day is in this spirit. I actually like this model for infrequently used software.

anonymoushn 5y ago
Right, it certainly seems nicer than paying monthly for Adobe CC so I can open Photoshop once every 3 months.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

spacemanmatt 5y ago

How long has AWS been selling compute by the second?

kgwxd 5y ago
Yeah but that's mostly for stuff that's supposed to always be available, like web services. I'll be damned if I'm going to start worrying about leaving my PC on because my OS charges by the second, or leaving certain windows open, or what background tasks are running. No only would it be unmanageable, it be a constant source of tension no one would want in their lives.
jaza 5y ago
But who does AWS make the most money from? Those with cloud-native solutions, running almost entirely on lambda and dynamodb? Or those who have lift-and-shift-ed legacy solutions, running almost entirely on reserved EC2 and RDS instances? AWS has been saying for yonks that they'd love for all their customers to be cloud-native and to pay less. But they must be banking on many of their customers (especially the enterprise / government ones) not actually making that switch anytime soon.
- emteycz 5y ago
  EC2 instance costs the same whether I use its RAM or not (these resources are sold as spot instances). I pay for Lambda only when it executes and only exactly for what I used.
  - mushyhammer 5y ago
    Sometimes that works out in your favor, others it doesn’t. Lambda minutes are far more expensive than EC2’s
  - drunkpotato 5y ago
    While true, it's not the whole story. lambda is also approximately 1000x more expensive than EC2. So if your lambda is only running 0.1% of the time or less (12 seconds per every 3 hours 20 minutes) you break even. If it runs more than that, lambda is more expensive. This is just price comparison. There are other reasons, convenience, visibility, integration with other services, to choose lambda sometimes and EC2 other times. It's important to profile and know what your use case is!
    - vlovich123 5y ago
      Source on the price comparison? Or did you mean that Lambda is 1000x cheaper than EC2 [1][2]? It's obviously load dependent but functions-style code is going to typically be cheaper than even the smallest EC2 instance while handling more load (provided your RAM/CPU usage fits within the envelope it's optimized around). Disclaimer: I work at Cloudflare on R2 and Workers is even cheaper than Lambda@Edge (provided your workload fits within the compute envelope). Billing is based on CPU time not wall time [3]. Workers Bundled pricing can be more cost effective in some cases if you only need <= 50ms of compute. [1] https://lumigo.io/blog/aws-lambda-vs-ec2/ https://lumigo.io/blog/aws-lambda-vs-ec2/ [2] https://www.trek10.com/blog/lambda-cost https://www.trek10.com/blog/lambda-cost [3] https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-workers-unbound/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-workers-unbound/
charcircuit 5y ago
About 4 and a half years.
paxys 5y ago
The vast majority of AWS revenue comes from fixed-price multi-year reserve contracts. Billing by the second/minute/hour really only happens for hobbyists and small fish.
- spacemanmatt 5y ago
  AWS do not mess around with price tiers and cost breaks for customers who can commit to some resources for a year or more, and I'm sure those will also be their bigger institutional customers. I think you nailed it.

SmooL 5y ago

So, if I keep my word document open on my computer and start doing other things, I still get billed? Not sure end users will like this or think it's easier.

alexb_ 5y ago
The way I see the future of computing: You have what basically amounts to a keyboard, a screen, and a wifi chip, so that it can be sold at astonishingly low prices. No excess memory, no excess processing power, because all memory and storage will be rented out or extracted for data collection. Privacy will become a thing of the past since everything you do passes through a corporation that's doing the real computing. You will own absolutely none of your data or your programs, you are beholden to the whims of a corporation that can raise prices whenever they feel like, and it will become the norm because "wow cool $90 computer that can run any program". People will absolutely buy inferior products if it's cheap enough and marketed well enough.
- shawnz 5y ago
  Based on historical trends it seems more likely to me that $90 computers of the future will simply be able to run the most advanced consumer software locally and thin clients will just be unnecessary complexity.
  - disposedtrolley 5y ago
    The hardware will probably have the capabilities to do so, but I can see consumer software reaching a point where much of the compute is performed remotely, and we're just being streamed a rendered interface.
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      If the hardware has the capability of doing all my calculations locally, then why would I want to do it all remotely and just receive a rendered interface? So that I can have the "added convenience" of having my software unavailable during the occasional network outage? And the pleasure of network latency, even when there isn't an outage?

cassonmars 5y ago

I don’t doubt this at all, but I suspect it will extend to all aspects of software, including the OS — it is the inevitable state of full decentralization. However, I expect also that the usage of software in being metered will also be countered by in-kind contributions, in that the power you feed back to the decentralized grid will compensate your use of the software you need. Disclaimer: I am working on exactly this notion of a decentralized PaaS

henning 5y ago

Restating your claim is not an argument, even if you tack on that it is "inevitable" without any evidence or actual argument to support that claim. The answer to future shitty software that sucks ass is to use or write different software. I understand that lots of companies use Outlook/Exchange and won't switch anytime soon.

cassonmars 5y ago
I think you meant to reply in thread to me since I was the only commenter that said “inevitable” before your post. That being said, I said this was the inevitable state of full decentralization, not that full decentralization was an inevitability. I cannot speak to how the market will ultimately decide on this topic, but I can build towards it as I believe it to be an ideal state in that the computing power of the world is currently sub-optimally used and reaching an equilibrium would be beneficial overall.
- tialaramex 5y ago
  The word "inevitable" is from the Longbet prediction itself > "... In five years, it will be metered by the nanosecond to end users. This is not only predictable, but inevitable." And that's the extent of the rationale for the prediction. The right thing to do when people insist their unfounded conclusions are "inevitable" is to take their money, but that's not an option here (the Long Now foundation keeps what they make on investing any "bet" for the duration, and the capital is paid to a charity of the winner's choice).
  - cassonmars 5y ago
    Fair, I missed the word inevitable in their prediction. I do personally believe it to be an inevitability, hence my investing my free time, energy and money into being a part of shaping that future. Ultimately any prediction in technology is defined by the whim of the market, so either my belief is correct and I can help in creating that future in a fairer way than some hyper-PaaS which does not impart an ability to earn or be an active part of that market segment (a future where AWS _is_ the core of computing is a terrifying future to me), or I am wrong, but the cryptography and distributed computing research I'm investing my time into will have beneficial uses regardless.

squarefoot 5y ago

In other words, computers will be sold like printers and software will be sold like ink cartridges.

gjsman-1000 5y ago
Can someone on Hacker News please just win a lottery and start a decent printer company? Call it "Ethical Printing Corporation" (EPiC) and make something that doesn't take a million drivers, have no replacement parts, break after two years, and require those darn proprietary cartridges in a million variations.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  I have to say almost every major printer company now has models with ink tanks in the printer which you can just fill with a bottle. The printers are sold at a premium but I think the price for the hardware is more realistic. I'm glad to see this development
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  It is really notable that there are successful open source, modular or standardised 3D printers but the projects to produce an equivalent document printer have struggled. Printers appear to be an unusual niche in that everyone needs them cheaply, but they also need to be highly precise to print documents and graphics well. So you have these cheap devices that pull off something very difficult -- thousands of tiny tiny droplets of ink per inch, precisely aligned, again and again, very quickly. But with plastic shells, mass-produced injection-moulded mechanics, and a few high cost, enclosed components. This is why they tend to have no replaceable parts, and integrated print heads. Because user-replaceable parts mean human-level tolerances, not factory machine tolerances, and human-level tolerances mean badly calibrated prints. In short, nobody wants to have to learn to tune their document printer the way everyone with a 3D printer expects to have to do. There are a few things that your EPC printer could focus on -- standardised ink delivery, standardised print heads, modular linear rails. But it will be difficult because it is difficult to solve for all of those things cheaply. If we could go back to e.g. the limitations of a golfball printer, we'd have ethical/open/modular implementations left, right and centre. Otherwise, be careful what you wish for, unless you really want to tinker with your printer.

gjsman-1000 5y ago

I doubt this will happen for regular consumers mainly because per-second billing is overly complicated and potentially easy to fake by editing the amount of seconds downward; and also because companies often have subscribers who never touch their software each month but remain subscribed, and those customers would be worth nothing if we switched.

JonChesterfield 5y ago

Claim is limited to "essential enterprise software". Submission title would be more accurate if "enterprise" was added to it.

ohCh6zos 5y ago

What can we, as developers, do to take back computing and move it to being more free and less commercial?

akomtu 5y ago
Form a "software engineering association" with fees paying for full time lawyers and lobbyists and try to pass laws that would prevent the scenario above. But expect a very organised and well funded opposition: the anti-privacy trends have big sponsors at the top.
bediger4000 5y ago
Don't develop for Windows, or MacOS for that matter. If your OS is uncontrolled, so is the software.
TameAntelope 5y ago
Don't be a developer as a profession, and that'll pretty quickly resolve the need to be paid for software you create. I guess you'd also not be allowed to value your time or effort, either.
contravariant 5y ago
Same thing as always, make better free and non-commercial software.
sz3 5y ago
At the risk of being reductive: Make more of our software copyleft? Even weak copyleft? As a thought experiment, imagine how the modern web might've played out if KHTML was released under the MIT license instead of the LGPL? Bearing in mind: Google has other ways of controlling the market (search, android, youtube, gmail, "switch to chrome" everywhere... don't call it anti-competitive...), but they've had to work much harder to exert control than they would've -- IMO -- if blink/webkit/khtml had a more "corporate friendly" license. Maybe I'm off base with my reasoning, but I see it as being about friction. We can't stop the inhuman profit-seeking machine from doing what it does, but we do have some (underutilized) tools to slow it down.
5y ago

dboreham 5y ago

Definitely wrong. Vendors like predictable revenue. Pricing based on actual usage doesn't provide this.

TillE 5y ago
Yeah, the ideal is to get customers (business or consumer) on a monthly subscription regardless of how much they use the software. There's just no advantage to this in the vast majority of cases.
- ramoz 5y ago
  Ideal is multi-year for enterprise software
- pbuzbee 5y ago
  Yes, to me this incentivizes customers to use your software as little as possible, which seems like the opposite of what you would want to encourage: lock in.
mushyhammer 5y ago
Is AWS the proof you’re wrong or just the exception?
- bawolff 5y ago
  In aws, if you aren't using it someone else could be. With SAAS office software, this is not the case or at least capacity is much more divorced from usage.
- alpaca128 5y ago
  AWS isn't a software product as defined in the post though. It goes more along the lines of Office 365 or Adobe's tools, but those are just standard subscriptions and I doubt that'll change any time soon.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  The difference with AWS (eg EC2) is the people who run their workload in a few hours on an instance is the minority. Most people are going to have a base amount of servers. The hourly billing tries to encourage customers to spend more to scale their resources with demand of their service. Maybe having an extra N nodes on stand by isn't affordable for a customer, but you they could afford those extra N nodes during peak hours.

wubbert 5y ago

I seriously doubt this. They can make way more money billing everyone per month than by the second. They might make more from the top percent of heavy users, but I bet most users only use it less than an hour a month. There is no way that they can find a price that would be worth charging some who only a couple of minutes while also keeping it affordable for someone who uses it al day every day.

mushyhammer 5y ago
> They can make way more money billing everyone per month than by the second. Based on what? Obviously the price per second will be higher than a fixed monthly rate. See Lambda vs EC2 pricing for example. AWS’ whole infrastructure is pay-per-use and they’re banking.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  Because you need Office even if you only use it one hour every month? Look at the gym industry, which makes its money off people not using their memberships.
  - mushyhammer 5y ago
    Software isn’t gym though, it can be “used” by just keeping it in the background for multiple sessions in a tab somewhere, especially if the software does some monitoring so it’s always active. Whether this makes sense though depends on the software. For me personally I would not terribly mind to pay Photoshop by the minute because I would need it an hour per year. That’s extra cash that Adobe now just does not see. Most professionals though would still keep paying monthly because they use it a lot.
    - saalweachter 5y ago
      How much are you willing to pay for your hour of usage per year? $1? $10? $100? Is the amount of work it would take to implement a metered rate at a rate users would pay worth it to capture the people who don't use it as a regular part of their job?

alkonaut 5y ago

Doubt it. Not for office. But for niche software like specialty engineering software etc this is already the case. In the case of the software I build for a living the billing granularity is minutes (and this is for traditional heavy desktop software not some web SaaS).

ccakes 5y ago
Super interesting! Can you share the name of the software?
- akoster 5y ago
  IIRC while on an internship at Broadcom, lots of EDA tools were utilized by sending a script to a (Sun Solaris?) grid compute cluster to save on license costs or due to licenses being billed per minute or cpu-minute. I do recall some internal "wall of shame" dashboard listing users with the most (idle?) minutes using an EDA tool.
  - not2b 5y ago
    It is more likely that the company has a fixed number of licenses for some product, and is using a grid to maximize the amount of work they get out of those licenses. That is the usual practice with expensive EDA software, to the extent that the vendors will help customers set it up.
- d_t_w 5y ago
  Not the OP but our product falls into the 'specialty engineering software' category. We build an enterprise ready tool for teams working with Apache Kafka (https://kpow.io https://kpow.io) and offer an hourly price. The deliverable is a single docker container (not a desktop app!) and right from the start, nearly three years now, we've been selling on the AWS Marketplace for 0.16c/hr: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-5jvke6codhrsm https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-5jvke6codhrsm We have a couple of pricing models, but on the consumption based model we stick to that clear, transparent hourly price. It's good for customers that choose that model, and good for us because we're engineers and we don't care for opaque enterprise sales practices. We do a fair number of enterprise sales too, they require a negotiation because metering usage at an enterprise level is rarely practical. Even then the price is some calculation of usage/value + support. Keeps it simple, lets us attack a big market as a small team and stay focused on technical delivery, shortens the sale/negotiation time, and our customers know they're basically paying the same price as anyone else.

catsarebetter 5y ago

The point of frequent pricing like subscription is to create stability in the business, probably once a month for software is based off of the financial cycles. Maybe in some decentralized world lol.

annoyingnoob 5y ago

Then it will be like the Bell Companies all over again, but with data/processing instead of voice.

amalcon 5y ago

Metering software by the second seems worse for both the developer (whose revenue becomes less predictable than e.g. monthly billing) and the typical customer (who now needs to think about whether the particular document they want to write warrants paying for Office, or whether it's fine to just do it in GDocs or LibreOffice). It benefits someone who just uses Excel for a short time to do their budgeting each month (because it saves them money), but it also decreases the value of that customer so much that Microsoft probably doesn't care that they get (wild guess) 5x as many of them.

BizarroLand 5y ago
It would make sense in fringe cases, but not for mainstream use. Purchasing access to exclusive content with pre-paid minutes is not a new thing after all, but most people want either buy-once-pay-once or "manageable monthly/annual rate", not a highly variable and potentially very spendy financial timebomb ticking away on their computers.

whateveracct 5y ago

mine won't

deleted 5y ago

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mbroshi 5y ago

I see a lot of doubters, but the bet is still open. If you're so doubtful, go ahead and put your money where your mouth is!

stubish 5y ago
It isn't a bet. It is a donation to charity with the hassle of going through a registration process.

lumost 5y ago

This will depend heavily on the use case. Generally, you want your users to be as engaged with your software as possible - meaning they actively use it as often as possible. If you charge per second then they will find alternatives, they’ll have to think of ways to pause and resume the software when they are in between tasks. This adds real costs and disincentives for the customer to use your product. When they compare billing to a per user license, they might perceive the per user license as lower cost.

deleted 5y ago

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awinter-py 5y ago

expect something more like open source platforms + file formats, commercially licensed plugins for non-commodity pieces of the puzzle office <-> avid is a pretty broad spectrum. I'm sure there are ways in which office is not a commodity available for free on every platform, and as a libreoffice user I feel the limitations of libreoffice sometimes, but office software is mostly a commodity. video + graphics software OTOH doesn't have a strong oss contender IMO also unclear how AI will change the game -- will we sell software or trained models. will plugins from different training sets be 'incompatible' in some way that favors one-stop-shop vendors

ilaksh 5y ago

I was actually just planning on charging per four hour block for my Algorand Python IDE. Because the fees are tiny it is feasible.

neysofu 5y ago
Link?
- ilaksh 5y ago
  Maybe in the next month or so.

armchairhacker 5y ago

Longbet: most popular software becomes completely free. Paid software simply can't compete and companies are better off getting their money through other means. However you are paying for the energy required to run the software, and energy prices may also spike and become non-negligable. So technically, you are paying by the second.

stubish 5y ago

Charging by the hour is a great way of making users minimize use of your software. This is exactly not what you want your users to do. Some idiot will try this, but will quickly learn and revert or go under. Especially dumb with something like MS Office where the whole system is designed to keep users in the system 24x7 and reliant, rather than encourage alternate solutions for bits and pieces. Slash your software licensing costs by pasting text from notepad rather than typing it in MS Office, survive this months budget cuts, eventually realize you can do without the software entirely.

tobyjsullivan 5y ago
You could make the same argument about per-user pricing. And you wouldn't be wrong.
- enraged_camel 5y ago
  This is true, per user pricing can result in stuff like customers sharing user accounts. Although it’s easier to counter that effect with per user pricing by adding things like audit logs, which are very valuable (and even required) in some industries.
friedturkey 5y ago
> Some idiot will try this, but will quickly learn and revert or go under. Or, more than likely, every major software company in a certain domain will coincidentally release metered software in the same time period and small indie developers will be trying to compete with products that have 30+ years of familiarity (and not really succeeding). Then other software industries will adopt the system within months and it'll be inescapable. This is precisely what happened with subscription services.

bArray 5y ago

> In five years, it will be metered by the nanosecond to end users. This is not only predictable, but inevitable. The only people working at nanosecond precision are likely to want a long-term project budget to allow for budget planning. > [..] specifically MS Office for business and Avid Pro Tools for film, will be metered in seconds, rather than distributed in a sales or monthly subscription model. Businesses have budgets to manage, and those are typically allocated on the order of months or years. Not only this, but the seconds interacted with these pieces of software would incentivize users to keep closing them, breaking workflow. I suspect we will see more license pools shared at companies for expensive software, with the possibility of pulling out additional licenses on-the-fly at an additional cost. On the other hand, an industry that may want per-minute billing is lawyers, who typically bill their clients per minute. That said, it's hardly worth the effort and is just considered part of the operational overhead of an employee. Metering hardware by the minute makes way more sense though, as is roughly correlates with wear. Things like electric scooters now charge per minute. But this is essentially the taxi model and this is obvious.

not2b 5y ago

And any programmer who finds an optimization that makes existing code run 10% faster will be fired, for costing the company 10% of revenue.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Kabie 5y ago

Human seconds or CPU seconds?

paxys 5y ago

Nope, won't happen. In fact, their argument is straight-up incorrect: > The first software was designed for, or sold to individual hardware manufacturers and distributed free with the hardware. In the next stage it was sold directly to end users. Next, it was sold under a subscription model to end users. In five years, it will be metered by the nanosecond to end users. This is not only predictable, but inevitable. The kind of software they are talking about (operating systems, word processors and other enterprise productivity software) was never given out for free, and the volume sold directly to end users was (and is) negligible. It was always a per-user license negotiated between sales and procurement teams since back when business software first became a thing, and will be so for the foreseeable future.

mattmaroon 5y ago

I don’t have much input on whether the gist of this is solid or not but it’s a very poorly structured wager. I can see unlimited ways in which the outcome could be disputed, such as Microsoft having tiers of office with different names, all of which don’t match what is listed and some charging that way and some not. This favors the challenger because they’re more likely to get a clear win. If I were this person I’d do a lot of clarification. Also why avid pro tools? That choice of something so niche makes me feel like the author knows something on that one.

Zachsa999 5y ago

Am I alone in hating cloud software? You gotta wait for the service to come back online, you lose a bunch of screen real estate, the context menu is slow and unpredictable. Obviously there is benefits, but couldn't networking be easily built into desktop apps as well?

paxys 5y ago
What is "cloud software"? I use Office 365 and it doesn't have any of the problems that you describe.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  The desktop version of O365 isn't really cloud software. It doesn't run in the cloud, it just stores its files there if you choose to do so, and checks it's licences there. The web version is, but it does have a lot of drawbacks.

eternityforest 5y ago

There's apparently an escape game control software that charges by the minute

Aeolun 5y ago

Hah, I feel safe challenging this. If I am somehow wrong, I’ll happily pay up (and lament the way the world has gone).

jrm4 5y ago

This is literally the dumbest idea I've ever seen on the front page of Hacker News. Now, I'm not saying it's 100% impossible. But if it happens, (ever), we can effectively declare "general purpose computing" dead.

ofou 5y ago

I'd pay per match on Tinder though

gverrilla 5y ago

annual subscription payments are a much safer bet also in the long future a lot will be just free

ivanche 5y ago

Dozens of commenters disagreeing here yet still no challengers on Longbets site…

ksec 5y ago

Vast majority ( if not All ) of the HN reply seems to be betting against it. Let me be the usual contrarian. The message is very specific about business software, not any software ( as the headline suggest ), I actually think this isn't so bad provided the following: You get freemium usage every month. In that case, everyone gets to use Microsoft Office for free. And that is a huge lock in if it isn't already. You have caps, just like AWS, the cap will be cheaper than actually billing per second. The subscription per month stays in place. Because companies like OpeX, but the usage model gives them a lot of flexibility. Especially in terms of cross selling to other software within the same company. The only problem is I only see this being possible if the software is run on server and streamed to clients. Otherwise I dont see how they could meter it and we are just back to the old crackz or warez era.

ryathal 5y ago
This basically already exists with Azure functions/AWS Lamda. The missing step is just converting the cloud bill x profit to the end consumer.

WheelsAtLarge 5y ago

There's a trend of manufacturing scarcity for bits. Users don't like it but companies will use it as a way to goose earnings. Once a company finds a way to do it then all other companies will start to do it. We've started to see something similar with all the paywalls that have gone up in the last decade. A good example are wireless companies. Cell phone companies could have gone the unlimited subscription model route many years ago but yet they continue to limit the use. It's not a straight per minute model but you can divide the monthly charges by the minutes and it works out the same way. The way to fight it is to go open source and the expansion of community projects like Wikipedia and such. But getting people to do work for the public good without compensation in the long term is next to impossible. Charging by the period of time is coming. I'm 100% sure.

tsunamifury 5y ago

It’s already sold by the second via compute. It just is repacked then sold in a subscription down the line for accounting ease.