Pay-As-You-Go

Outline

Goal

Offer hosting that feels as simple as choosing a plan but operates on a true pay-as-you-go model so users only pay for what they actually use. This avoids the constraints of resold fixed plans while keeping things fair and predictable.

1. Free Level

  • Who gets it
    • People doing tasks in other sites we operate.
    • Paying customers during their first month, essentially as a trial.
  • What it includes
    • A fixed monthly resource quota (bandwidth, disk, CPU minutes, etc.)
    • Enough for normal small-site operation but clearly limited.
    • No email (to deter parasites) If they pay a 5-dollar deposit, they get the full basic account.
  • Purpose
    • Gather real usage data without charging the user.
    • Help users understand their actual resource profile so they can decide how much to deposit for month 2.

2. Deposit-Based Pay-As-You-Go (from Month 2 onward)

How it works

  1. At the start of each month, the user makes a deposit.
  2. Throughout the month, we track actual usage.
  3. At the end of the month:
    • We subtract the real cost from the deposit.
    • The remainder carries forward, and if it’s low, we prompt them to top up.

Benefits to Users

  • They can “set and forget” a deposit, similar to picking a plan.
  • They never get surprise bills → everything is prepaid.
  • If they use less, money stays in their account — not like fixed-plan waste.
  • If they use more, the system can auto-warn or restrict until they top up.

Benefits to Us

  • Predictable prepaid revenue.
  • Flexible usage fitting inside reseller hosting limitations.
  • No need to maintain rigid plan tiers.
  • Avoids negative balances and chargebacks.

3. Why This Works Even With Resold Plans

We can track a few key metrics that map cleanly to our upstream plan constraints:

  • Total disk usage
  • Total monthly bandwidth
  • CPU usage / executions (depending on provider; could be approximated)
  • Number of inodes
  • Email throughput/storage (if applicable)

Instead of selling fixed plans, we simply charge proportionally based on usage relative to upstream limits.

This lets us stay within upstream plan caps while presenting a fluid PAYG interface to users.