Our startup both provides and consumes commercial API's. We and most of the API's we integrate with charge based on requests, or a fixed monthly cost plus requests. One of the partners i'm currently negotiating only have a handful of customers and do a bespoke deal with each integrator.They want us to pay a large monthly fee from day 1 which would include development/integration time. They...
the people that float to the top in those organizations aren't good managers, innovators or motivators - they're political strategists and careerists
to pull it off properly as a service provider, you really need to have a solid understanding of user usage patterns.
one of the big problems that tips the low/high utilization ratio unfavorably is that unlimited plans that are primarily marketed for being unlimited tend to attract users in the high utilization bracket.
so the challenge for service providers is not just understanding users and understanding that ratio but figuring out how you are going to market to, and signup, those users who will be in the low utilization bracket and will essentially be paying for something they won't be user (which is hard to do)
it isn't hard to find case studies of companies that launch optimistically with one pricing plan around unlimited, to then only go back and revise their pricing and break promises because they didn't understand their users and were unable to market to and signup low utilization users.
one recent example is Bitcasa
I swear by Route53, it is the only service I use on AWS and I have moved a lot of my clients over to it.
I think what this post is arguing is that it was a natural progression, since others were on the same path at the same time.
I tend to side with Apple, but reading that testimony their witness/expert seems to be grasping at straws in some parts.