[HCoop-Discuss] comments on payment schemes

[Nathan Kennedy]

Adam Chlipala wrote:
> Nathan Kennedy wrote:
>
>   
>> 1. I think any scheme dependent on members voluntarily paying more or 
>> less based on willingness, and not usage or some other factor, is a 
>> terrible idea. [snip]
>>
>> 2. I would like to reiterate that I think it would be a big mistake to 
>> enforce equal dues and equal services for every member, and I think 
>> Terrence is spot-on here.
>>     
> But consider what the causal relationship is between member resource 
> usage and how much we pay for colocation: until we reach a saturation 
> point where Peer 1's offer is no longer good enough for us, there is no 
> relationship at all!  So why base monthly dues towards colocation costs 
> on resource usage?  I can see it more for one-time costs of buying new 
> hardware as we outgrow old hardware, but that should happen infrequently 
> enough that the issues are much less important.
>   
This is silly.  Our need for capacity is based on the aggregate of all 
member's usage.  In every business, any overhead is split on a pro-rata 
basis.  I don't see why we should resort to some bizarre voluntary 
scheme at this point and acclimatize users (and new members) to that, 
why not set up a scheme *now* whereby users pay, in some manner, 
proportionate to usage?  Obviously depending on the amount of excess 
capacity, number of users, and distribution of resource usage, the exact 
pricing scheme will need to be occasionally tweaked, just as it is in 
any web-hosting business.

-ntk