Jim, have you figured out yet how Provue will charge for using the server? If so, what will it be. Answer whenever you are ready; no rush. I almost hate to ask this sort of question since it’s not the main think you are working on. I see that I last asked you about this in October. Tom
Still haven’t nailed that down.
The tenative plan is to price it by usage, sort of like electricity. So low usage, low price, high usage, higher price. The current version does track usage (requests, amount of data transferred, runtime, # of sessions) and periodically uploads it to provue.com. Every now and then I take a look just to verify that the system is actually working, it seems to be.
At the moment, I don’t really have any context to understand these numbers. What is high usage? What is low usage? I don’t think I can really figure that out until there are a bunch of testers, some of whom are using it in production. So it will probably be a while before this is really nailed down.
I’m sure that I recently saw this information but cannot find it anywhere now. I have a need to refer a couple of clients to it, so unless I imagined it, where is the server pricing posted?
The available information is on the Denali FAQ page, under How Much will Panorama X Server Cost.
My intention is to have customers not only purchase inexpensive products on my Server, but also use them on the Server.
Looking at the pricing set-up I fear success might result in me losing money. Is this not the way to go for a business such as mine?
Sorry, I don’t understand the premise of your question.
My guess is that in having them use the products on your server, you’re providing a web based interface. Otherwise they need to have a copy of Panorama running on their machine.
If that’s the case, you’re paying for the volume of hits. Depending on just how inexpensive you want to go, you get a lot of traffic without running up the tab much.
Thank you. I find Jim’s pricing for Panorama very fair and have faith that this will be, also. Your description reinforces those thoughts. Can’t say I really understand the pricing system, but that’s not going to stop me.
In most cases, to run it as a web server you start with the client and server. Cost per month depends largely on how you choose to pay. I like to buy a lot of advance months which are more like monthly usage units.
You’re using the client on your machine to build, manage and web publish your databases to the server. At that point you have a simple client and server scenario.
Each time someone visits your site and causes Panorama server to process the request, that gets counted in the web server category. So, per the published pricing quoted below, you’ll be paying about $10 if you reach 10,000 requests in a month - plus your base client and server cost. 10,000 is a lot of hits and you should certainly be charging your paying customers enough to cover that. But don’t forget the costs for your domain name, hosting service, server machine…
The first 2,000 requests each month are free. For each additional 4,000 requests, one month will be debited from your account. For example, 10,000 requests would result in two months being debited (equivalent to $10 if you are purchasing 60 months or more at a time).