[ezekg]

Last time I dealt with usage-based pricing, I racked up a $13k bill for an APM service. I wasn't aware it was even happening until the attempted charge at the end of the month. No warning emails we sent to me. Thankfully, they let me off the hook as I had been a customer for years before they moved to usage-based pricing. But I'm no longer a customer, because that event made me reevaluate if the service was really even worth it at that point in time.

Suffice it to say -- as the owner of an SMB, I despise usage-based pricing.

[runako]

That shouldn't be a knock against usage-based pricing per se, that's a knock against usage-based pricing that fails the predictability test (#4).

Products aimed at other parts of the enterprise (e.g. Sales, HR, Support, etc.) frequently meter on the # of seats. Since a "seat" usually maps to an employee, this has the benefit of being predictable as well as proportionate (to the overall cost of the employee).