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.
> 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.
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.
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?
We're dealing with a video streaming service and the minutely billing is interesting. We're trying to see if we can negotiate pricing, turns out it gets expensive if the app gets used hourly/entire day. -- pricing based on number of participants and archive quality/duration.
There are other options/build your own but the cost to reintegrate or quality.
