[typedweb]

The system I'm developing is a message passing system, so I've looked mostly at PubNub's pricing model to get the idea for a tiered system. Mine is going to be a lot smaller at the start and it's only me running it so I'm looking at the least hassle and maintenance for collecting fees.

[brianwawok]

So what are the competitors?

A really simple message passing system is http://aws.amazon.com/sqs/pricing/

first million free, then 50 cents per million after that. I suspect you will do something fancier and cost more...

Personally when I look at services like this, I look for 2 things.

1) Free tier. Not time based, but volume based. If some prototype takes me 3 months to write, I don't want to run out of a free demo 2 weeks in.

2) Does pricing scale in a sane way? Or does it go free... free... free... $5,000 a month! If I see an insane price scale, I will also avoid something. I always price something vs doing it myself.. and for a smaller app, I could never afford 5k so why even mess with the product.

[typedweb]

Thanks for the info. I've done some research on competitors and I'm trying to find the correct pricing vs my costs for the system. This is my first web service so I'm really just trying to figure out all the details on something simple that I haven't seen provided yet and go from there. Hopefully some people will find it useful, but I realize I have to keep my pricing in check but my costs in balance.