[dannyw]

How many small hobbyists really want to front load $150, instead of paying $5 a month, and would only be swayed if they got interest/credits?

At 5% simple interest, your $150 would give you 62.5c per month. So you'd need closer to ~~$1200 to have a perpetual hosting machine; for a $5/month VPS or whatever.

You also now have an additional problem: $1200 of committed spend on a cloud provider; which could go out of business one day; for a $5/month workload.

I think for most people, the second problem is much bigger than "I don't wanna set up recurring billing".

[bojangleslover]

This is aimed at CFOs, not hobbyists

[dannyw]

I do appreciate you doing this btw, I find it nice and clever. I like how it democratizes a mechanism that enterprises have (net discounts, similar effective mechanisms) and makes it accessible to everyone.

I was replying to the parent comment, I'm just saying "prepay and commit thousands of credits so you get to run $5/month" isn't a good idea to me, but I do like your mechanism.