My business partner and I have recently observed that a growing number of web services seem to be moving toward 'atomized' business models instead of a typical flat-rate subscription model.<p>A simple example of this is Amazon with their cloud solutions: they bill you in extremely small increments depending on your usage.<p>We are currently considering building what could be described as the Recurly or Chargify for atomized payments as neither of these handle the exact use case I'm talking about.<p>As many members of HN would be part of the initial target market and will of course have many interesting thoughts, does anyone here have a need for such a product? If so, feel free to leave your email at http://atompay.semblancesystems.com so we can give you updates!<p>General discussion also welcome: Do you think more SaaS businesses will follow this model in the future? What other solutions have you seen in the wild?
Any time I'm paying only for what I consume (atomized) I'm happier than when I'm stuck in a slot in a pricing table somebody created with very little idea about which features I really need, how many users I need and how much of the service I need to consume per month.<p>But coding atomized pricing for a platform is often much harder than coding a price/feature table so anything that offered atomized billing as a service (ABaaS?) would be great.
I'm interested in this for ninjablocks, too - I think we're currently bundling a small number of resources (SMSes etc) with each account, but then perhaps more fine-grained tracking.