Announcing Commercial "Pay-per-Use" Pricing

[Former Community Member]

Hi all,

To all those eager to hear about our pricing, I'm pleased to be able to share this with you all.  As of today, the LiveCycle Collaboration Service (LCCS) is available for purchase on a "pay-per-use" model -- worldwide!

Dimension	Price	Description
Live Stream Bandwidth	$0.49 USD per GB	Up/down live stream bandwidth, such as real-time audio and video. P2P stream via RTMFP is excluded though LCCS will gracefully switch connection methods if a P2P connection cannot be established or maintained.
Push Messages	$0.10 USD per 1K	Push messages are data messages in to the service. Data messages out are excluded. Some examples of data messages include chat messages and shared cursors. Push messages assist in collaborative workflows between clients.
User Minutes	$0.01 USD per Hour	User minutes is the amount of time that a connection is maintained to the service. If there are 3 connections maintained over a 5 minute period, the total user minutes for that session is 15 minutes.

Note: Though multiple currencies are supported and your payment card will be charged in the appropriate currency, the developer portal interface and billing emails will be in English and USD only.

For more detailed information around our pricing model, please see the attached FAQ.  Sign up now for a free account and/or upgrade your account now via our developer portal.

For those who we can't get anything past, we'll explain the rebranding later...

Thanks,

Fang

[Former Community Member]

Hi Fang -- the service looks great. I'd like to clarify a point about potential high-volume usage.

We're building a video chat app that could become very high-volume. Hypothetically, let's say we have 1m users, day and night. Each one sends 100 messages per hour and -- each month -- uses 100 MB of bandwidth. Hypothetically again, all the video/audio streaming would go through P2P.

1) Would it really cost $14.5 million per month, or does a 'user minute' register only when there is server activity for a user during a given minute?

2) Do you see these stats below as more or less accurate? [note that messages would be used only for: peering; IM on our site]

$0.01/User*1,000,000Users*24hours*30days=$7,200,000

$0.0001/Message*1,000,000Users*100Messages*24hours*30days=$7,200,000

$0.45/GB*100,000GB=$45,000

[Former Community Member]

Hi There,

What's interesting about this model is that you're assuming 1M users at

all times. Based on experience, concurrency tends to run at less than 5% for

any service, so you're talking about at least 20M users total. So, if you

can derive $1/month of value per user, you're making $5.5M. Is that not

realistic?

nigel

[Former Community Member]

Thanks for your response, Nigel. I don't think that model will scale for any significant business. As an example, Facebook derives around $2 per year from its users, and it is starting to do a decent job monetizing. Now imagine if it relied on a 3rd party service like LCCS and they proposed taking a cut of 65% of gross revenues. Not realistic.

It seems to me that LCCS pricing is far out of line with FMS pricing -- around 100x more, even if you include Amazon EC2 hosting for FMS -- so I wondered if I am misreading the LCCS pricing?

You are quite right about 20MM users equating to 1MM connections. But what are the advantages of LCCS over FMS (or 'FMS + our own cluster engineering') when the price disparity is so enormous?

[Former Community Member]

Hi RDGB2,

Comparing the "pay-per-use" pricing model with that of FMS's  is really apples and oranges.  The real answer here is that your  project is probably too big for "pay-per-use" as this pricing model is  really designed for people to get started quickly, easily, and  cheaply.   I think a concurrency based pricing model is more appropriate for your scale -- check out this blog post: http://blogs.adobe.com/collabmethods/2010/04/have_it_your_way.html.

Thanks,

Fang

[cwalters53]

Can you answer the following questions about LCCS Pay Per Use Pricing?

Is this version of LCCS only for developing prototypes or doing light development?

How would one be sure of uptime guarantee and is there any sort of technical support available?

I have heard that this environment will be taken offline for 12-24 hours or sometimes a day or two. Is this correct? If so, how can we deploy apps for our customers?

Thanks!

[Former Community Member]

Hi There,

No, this version of LCCS is as good as it gets =). We've definitely never

taken the system offline for any length of time you describe - our uptime

for 2010 is actually above 99.9%. We do have scheduled maintenance windows,

which typically last an hour or less, and in most cases don't have any

downtime for our customers.

hope that helps

nigel

[Former Community Member]

Hi cjwalters53,

The current support mechanism available for "pay-per-use" and free  trial customers  today is through the forums.  If you need full-time coverage, phone  support and a service level guarantee, it's best to look at the other  pricing options -- see this blog  post here.

Thanks,

Fang