Pricing scheme for hosting

luceos

There are different hosting options for flarum ranging from shared hosting to cloud. I've always wondered what our community believes is the best way to pay for services like that. The hardship with scalable solutions is that you somehow need the client to pay for use of resources, like cpu, memory and disk.

A few common pricing schemes include

Pay per use. Each resource is quantified into a monetary value. Most often you'll pay after a period.
Pay with tiers. Each tier contains a specific amount of resources and you can choose when to upgrade into a higher tier should the need arise.
Pay per size. You pay a specific rate based on metrics of your community, eg users, posts and visitors etc.

Do you know additional models and which one do you prefer?

matteocontrini

In the past I considered a Discourse SaaS hosting and the plans were differentiated based on features like plugins that were available and storage. The thing I really disliked though was the limit on the number of page views. I had no idea how many page views I would have, so I was scared that I could incur into the limit too early. So that's something I wouldn't like, personally, just because it's too difficult to estimate it in advance.

Kayo

I know Flarum is only beta now, but in the future u guys can do an hosting system with support and paid extension pack (parcery with extiverse, FoF, etc) as discourse do. Those more experient can continue with their VPS of course, but people more amateur can use flarum hosting system with real time update instead of flarum pro that it's already an existing service.

Kayo

I prefer pay per size because i don't like surprises and don't have enough money for expensive billing too hahaha, i dont know if happens to u all but adsense don't performs very well on forums too, or is only me?

010101

Pay with tiers? If I'm understanding correctly. Pay per use sounds like maybe an Amazon S3 situation? Where you pay depending on how much traffic you get that month? I don't like that. Not great for a hobbyist. Or small business. Suddenly you get a big bill... then what? Pay per size... maybe... But, maybe you don't know what size your community will be. So, that leaves tiers; then you can always upgrade.

Digital

Pay what you need, would be a good example. Maybe an extension-like pricing tier? Pretty much Flarum structure.

We can offer base tiers. Customers will then be able to add extensions/add-ons feature to that tier.