[HCoop-Discuss] Reduced rate qualifications

[Nathan Kennedy]

frayedthread at hcoop.net wrote:
> I like the tiered pricing system idea, but I have some concerns.
> Like you said, it's more inclusive to members that cannot afford
> higher monthly costs.
Which is a very important point, seeing as a number of our members would 
jump ship, and not for a bad reason.  They would be overpaying for a 
level of service they can't use and don't need.  HCoop is not suppose to 
be a charity.
> However, it may be more cooperative to maintain
> as little hierarchy as possible by making all members pay an equal
> amount and/or offering the same feature set to everyone.
>   
I don't understand this reasoning.

It's not more cooperative to require members to pay the same amount and 
receive the same services, it's just unflexible--it is offering only a 
single product and a single service.  Imagine a food co-op where 
everyone has to pay the same amount and buy the same quantities of the 
same groceries every week, or a housing co-op where everyone gets 
identical apartments whether they are single or a large family.

Cooperation is ensured by "one person one vote." Regardless of service 
level, all members have equal representation in the board.  If we are to 
serve a diverse group with diverse needs, it is economically inevitable 
that we will have to come up with a fair pricing scheme that reflects 
different levels of service, charging members dues that are reflective 
of their usage levels.  And of course it is not just economically 
inevitable but fundamentally fair,--it makes no sense for low-usage 
users to be massively subsidizing high-usage "leech" users.  Currently 
the difference between our highest and lowest users is a couple orders 
of magnitude, but as we expand and attract the ability to serve members 
with much larger needs (high bandwidth sites, or even VPS/collocation 
services), this gap will increase unless we totally disenfranchise users 
with most basic needs.  Dues assessed must reflect that.
> How would these tiers be determined? Would it have set quotas and
> features? Or would it have some sort scoring system based on disk and
> bandwidth usage?
>
> I think that if we go with a tiered system, the feature set should not
> be divided. I think we should have tiers based on usage, not features.
>   
I thought I explained that in my initial email.  I came up with the list 
of people qualifying for the lower tier by reviewing disk usage and 
bandwidth history, and picking those members with less than 50M of disk 
usage and consistently less than 15M of bandwidth usage.  Obviously 
every pricing scheme is arbitrary at some point, but looking at the 
current resource distribution this seemed like a reasonable and fair cutoff.

Quotas go hand-in-hand with usage, so it would make sense to 
additionally set an actual disk quota limit of 50M.
The only feature difference I proposed was requiring mail to be 
forwarded and denying IMAP/webmail to lower-tier users.  This is simply 
because we don''t have a good way of metering this usage (either in 
terms of bandwidth or CPU usage), and it is relatively 
resource-intensive, while at the same time there are a vast number of 
free email providers of all sorts out there providing all these 
services, so it is not much of a hardship to such users who might choose 
this option.

-ntk