Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I don't necessarily think that billing which is hard to estimate is good for anyone. For large deals I've seen this be a real turn off. Same with surprise bills. Ultimately if the service can scale billing in a way that their value scales to the customer (Datadog and Snowflake come close to this) then both the provider and the customer will be happy.



Side story, and that might not be true as of today, but Datadog was a nightmare billing-wise for me. Probably precisely because they didn't use a tool like the one launched in this post. Anything ranging from seeing your live usage to getting a rough idea of what your bill at the end of the month would be was impossible, not to mention the absence of any kind of alert even after reaching $30x our previous month usage. Usage based is fantastic when done properly, but can quickly turn to a nightmare for the user on half-assed systems.


I heard they only fully automated it post IPO, and have a full team of senior engineers + PM on this topic now!




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: