[HCoop-Discuss] On organizing people to get work done

[Adam Chlipala]

Daniel Margolis wrote:
> What makes it clear that the users paying the minimum are being 
> subsidized? Is the monthly cost of 122MB of disk usage and hardly any 
> CPU or bandwidth really over $3? On Amazon, that much storage and 
> equivalent transfer is $0.09/month. I think I'm subsidizing you.
>
> On 5/7/2009 4:20 PM, David Snider wrote:
>   
>> This is the problem I've always had with this 'share' type scheme. The
>> users paying the rock bottom price tend to get pissed when the true cost of
>> the services are no longer subsidized.
>>     

You need to take into account the black box of costs that is the rate 
Peer 1 charges us.  What calculations are you using to determine your 
fair share of that?  I'm guessing that most of the Peer 1 rate covers 
staff and physical space.  All member storage together takes up a 
negligible fraction of that space.  Do you have a better scheme to 
suggest than splitting Peer 1 costs evenly, in the absence of a clear 
idea of how each member's usage contributes to that cost?  Currently, an 
even split leaves each member with a share over $5.

I'm not saying that we can't rearrange our hardware situation to lower 
costs, but to me it's clear that, yes, with our current hardware set-up, 
any member paying only $5/mo. is being subsidized.