Andrew Savikas made an interesting comment on the Radar backchannel that seemed sharing more widely:
I remember a few years ago when there was a ton of buzz about
micropayments being the future of ecommerce, followed by a backlash on
how micropayments were a horrible idea, and would never overcome the
transactional costs. In the meantime, iTunes and S3 (among others)
have quietly been building great businesses on top of micropayments —
I think one important difference is that originally people thought of
micropayments as paying small amounts to many different people, vs.
paying incrementally to the same person/business.
Andrew’s comment was sparked by Amazon’s announcement of new S3 pricing:
With Amazon S3 recently celebrating its one year birthday, we took an
in-depth look at how developers were using the service, and explored
whether there were opportunities to further lower costs for our customers.
The primary area our customers had asked us to investigate was whether we
could charge less for bandwidth….
Sara Milstein noted that Google Adsense could also be conceived of as a micropayments system, this one in the more traditional sense of allocating small payments to many players. And of course, Amazon’s Associates program is also a micropayments system, as are many cell phone billing systems. How many others of these are there out there? If you use micropayments in your site or application, let us know.
Amazon’s full pricing announcement sent out in email appears below.
This is a note to inform you about some changes we’re making to our
pricing, effective June 1, 2007.With Amazon S3 recently celebrating its one year birthday, we took an
in-depth look at how developers were using the service, and explored
whether there were opportunities to further lower costs for our customers.
The primary area our customers had asked us to investigate was whether we
could charge less for bandwidth.There are two primary costs associated with uploading and downloading
files: the cost of the bandwidth itself, and the fixed cost of processing a
request. Consistent with our cost-following pricing philosophy, we
determined that the best solution for our customers, overall, is to
equitably charge for the resources being used – and therefore disaggregate
request costs from bandwidth costs.Making this change will allow us to offer lower bandwidth rates for all of
our customers. In addition, we’re implementing volume pricing for
bandwidth, so that as our customers’ businesses grow and help us achieve
further economies of scale, they benefit by receiving even lower bandwidth
rates. Finally, this means that we will be introducing a small
request-based charge for each time a request is made to the service. Below
are the details of the new pricing plan (also available at
http://aws.amazon.com/s3):Current bandwidth price (through May 31, 2007)
$0.20 / GB – uploaded
$0.20 / GB – downloadedNew bandwidth price (effective June 1, 2007)
$0.10 per GB – all data uploaded$0.18 per GB – first 10 TB / month data downloaded
$0.16 per GB – next 40 TB / month data downloaded
$0.13 per GB – data downloaded / month over 50 TB
Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 will remain free of
chargeNew request-based price (effective June 1, 2007)
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requestsStorage will continue to be charged at $0.15 / GB-month used.
The end result is an overall price reduction for the vast majority of our
customers. If this new pricing had been applied to customers’ March 2007
usage, 75% of Amazon S3 customers would have seen their bill decrease,
while an additional 11% would have seen an increase of less than 10%. Only
14% of customers would have experienced an increase of greater than 10%.We don’t anticipate making further structural changes to Amazon S3 pricing
in the future, but we will continue to look for ways to drive down costs
and pass the savings on to you.Sincerely,
The Amazon Web Services TeamP.S. Please note that the reduced bandwidth rates shown above will also
take effect for Amazon EC2 and Amazon SQS. The bandwidth tier in which you
will be charged each month will be calculated based on your use of each of
these services separately, and could therefore vary across services.