GitHub had tiers based on number of repos years ago, but people then put you their repos together to lower their bills.
AWS has per-usage pricing and people regularly are surprised by their bills, making if tricky - not all Saas can do it
Not everyone can have a pricing like Snowflake’s. And you’d be surprised by the number of customers that want a fixed « all inclusive » pricing for peace of mind.
Sure, I don't know what their primary driver of scale is for a customer. Maybe it is users for all I know; I just know that for many businesses user is not.
> GitHub had tiers based on number of repos years ago, but people then put you their repos together to lower their bills.
Repo is just another heuristic. I could create hundreds/thousands of repos before I (likely) match the cost of nixpkgs or crates.
Also, what you bill on will inform behavior. In the original article, there's the implication that people will share logins to reduce cost and with per-repo pricing you get people consolidating repos. In both cases, these behaviors reduce customer cost without reducing your cost, so now your product has effectively had its price cut. You could go the Oracle route and mandate audits to combat this, but that's going to torch your good will. Better to just bill on what drives cost.
Everyone is running around storing databases full of passwords, and for what? So they can put "CALL" on the Enterprise tier.
per user pricing always seems like a heuristic for how much you think a company can pay rather than getting them to pay for what they use. it subsidizes small companies and then ratchets up costs as they grow, which i guess is good for your business but sure feels like a dark pattern to me.