Ask HN: How did you set up usage-based billing?
For those who’ve built systems that need to charge by an ‘event’, like an API call, how did you meter usage and then bill customers?How’s that system holding up today?
Frank Abagnale committed financial crimes and had a wildly popular movie made from his story.
Assumes we all benefit from playing into the system Uber created.
Maybe true on a local maximum.
But is it true on the global one?
We have AiPrise already embedded but it'd be nice to have an agent do a first pass to review exceptions that get flagged for manual review.
If you could 1) integrate directly with iMessage so I'm literally just texting and 2) have your interface provide me some sort of LLM summary tool/weekly digest/remind me of things smartly (I dunno it's up to you to figure out), I'd probably do this.
Do you actively monitor how much customers owe you or even cap the size of their bill before they need to pay you?
This would be in case they have a significant amount of usage in a period.
For those who’ve built systems that need to charge by an ‘event’, like an API call, how did you meter usage and then bill customers?How’s that system holding up today?
It’s not.
It’s a cross-functional problem that mostly has to do with product (how it’s bundled, which features are on which tiers, and how customers move between tiers) and customer segmentation (how different customers value the features).
Needless to say the Rube Goldberg machine of Zaps was impossible to debug and all the data and metrics ended up being wrong for the whole quarter.
We ripped it all out and had to start fresh.
FWIW this is what growth teams think about all day when putting cash to work to grow the business.
Revenue = new revenue + expansion - contraction - churn
1) They're doubling down on enterprise-grade features "with the goal to grow enterprise application libraries"
2) They're doubling down on enterprise GTM "we will use the additional funds to accelerate go-to-market initiatives and customer support in selected areas."
3) Finally, they hired someone to lead their enterprise efforts in the US who has consulting experience: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guneetbedi/
Could have a federated LLM approach with different orgs owning different LLM specialties.
Commercial arrangement could look like telco’s roaming agreements.
>one of the main issues with VanMoof’s bikes is that they are custom designed from the ground up
service
>The first of these means it’s virtually impossible for anyone to repair a VanMoof bike themselves
and reliability
>The company has been facing a huge backlash for its models, not least because its bikes appear to be less than robust.
take a huge hit.
And for most teams, it’s really hard to get service and reliability correct out of the gate.
Multiply it by your entire product with its own interdependencies and VanMoof’s fate is very probable.
To play devil’s advocate, perhaps the OP’s chosen purpose is to accumulate money as fast as possible.
I’m guessing they’re using it for convolutions to increase the computation speed for calculating whether a given object placement and orientation interfere but my small brain wouldn’t really know.
If so, is that a common technique in optimization problems?
i.e. if you’re a social network company maybe you launch new networks periodically or figure out how to build a platform that helps change a user’s network over time.
Those things are so slow (for reasons which escape my small brain).
from u/gmt2027
>An extreme version of the same idea is the difference between understanding DNA vs the genome of every individual organism that has lived on earth. The species record encodes a ton of information about the laws of nature, the composition and history of our planet. You could deduce physical laws and constants from looking at this information, wars and natural disasters, economic performance, historical natural boundaries, the industrial revolution and a lot more.
and u/thomastjeffery
>That entropy is the secret sauce: the extra data that LLMs are sometimes able to model. We don't see it, because we read language, not text.
What an example of how local optimizations within an organization can destroy long term customer value.
Many comments below discuss how Amazon has lost customer trust through these practices.
Most likely the PM or business lead was praised at the time for the short term revenue bump gained from these dark patterns.
>PropBox is not a real estate company. It is a technically advanced media/advertising company that is specializing in advertising homes. The seller purchases an ad for a dedicated web page that benefits the seller and the buyer.
1) What PropBox is in simple terms the customer would use.
2) How it works (from the customer perspective).
During some exploratory exercises on the future of entertainment, they kept pushing him to come up with "planet-scale solutions".
After some hesitation, he started pitching them on "Space Basketball" and the opportunities for a league on Mars.
He got the on-site interview after that.
Seems like there’s opportunity to be the backend operating system to scale these practices.
That’s what PE is supposed to be anyway, but they don’t run it like an owner-operator would.
Had a family member receive an LOI at 10x EBITDA so they decided to sell (not sure where they closed).
They mentioned that if a doctor would have purchased the practice, it would be 1x or 2x at best.
Related: they would have been interested to scale up, but didn't know how and were afraid of the complexity of trying to manage a 3rd location.
sama on this:
“want to be stressed, watch some GPUs melt, and have a fun time? good at doing impossible things?
send evidence of exceptional ability to [email protected]” [1]
[1] https://twitter.com/sama/status/1630724485828714497?lang=en