Hey Brian, we know this is really important. Our beta label is mostly for the lack of pricing since the technology itself is production-ready. We're looking for more feedback and we aim to announce pricing soon.
What do you think about Urban Airship's model based on active monthly users? What we like is that the costs are obvious and map clearly to your business.
MAU doesn't seem like a good model to me; it's not very well connected to your costs or customers' usage so it creates weird incentives on both sides. And it makes it expensive for an existing product with a large userbase to try out a small simperium-based feature.
You guys are a hosting/infrastructure service, and it's probably for good reason that such services have historically charged based on usage. For you that could be something fairly raw like "GB transferred, GB stored" or something a little more abstract like "pushes" or "versions".
I'll second this. It makes you more comfortable as a user to know that if the incentives aren't misaligned your pricing will be more stable and easier for you to build a business on. I think its no surprise that AWS can keep making its services cheaper and App Engine had to change its pricing model entirely.
What do you think about Urban Airship's model based on active monthly users? What we like is that the costs are obvious and map clearly to your business.