[donavanm]

Personally I love usage based pricing that’s tied to costs. One thing I’ve noticed, maybe more in the last few years, is that customers don’t actually want this because, when done comprehensively, it leads to an overwhelming number of line items/dimensions. That instance example should really be run time per cpu/ram, and storage volume, and network IO, and maybe even storage IO. Multiply those half dozen dimensions by the 10s of resources used and now they’re going to struggle to parse the bill and tie it together.

The other bane is value based pricing that business units and MBAs love. Trying to extract the maximum downstream (economic) value from the customer who’s using the service.

I do reckon you’re right though. Providing more timely estimated usage, and maybe even an approximate or base rate, would answer a LOT of these questions.