What I love about the concept of metered pricing is how direct it is. You pay exactly for the resources in use. No strange statistics, heuristics and assumption

What I love about the concept of metered pricing is how direct it is. You pay exactly for the resources in use. No strange statistics, heuristics and assumptions have been applied to your data, whatever it is, that's what you're using and that's that. You can then look at your month-to-month usage and do the statistics yourself. I do like the proposals in the article, but I wouldn't make the metered pricing that invisible. I'd call it Elastic Tarsnap, put it in the same table before Tarsnap Professional, give it a faded background and put the language with the picodollar pricing on it. This will communicate that that's the intended product for the truly paranoid power user who needs their personal data backed up. Maybe even put that exact sentence under it "Backups for truly paranoid power users (or unix geeks)". Because it's not just corporations that have specific needs, we unix geeks have specific needs too.