The pricing model doesn't scale realistically and would require a subscription service for users. An app with 1M+ installs could do 1M+ calls per day making this service $24k / month.
Something isn't well thought-out here. The pricing? The usage?
$49 per month for one million records, one million calls over the API and only 20(!) sessions. I don't think there's a consumer or business app that I could build that would stay under the session and call limits.
It'd be more interesting if it was a pay-per-use pricing model, e.g.: $0 the first n calls (to try the service, even if it's for commercial purposes) and then $0.0016 per call of whatever you want to charge
> I have no idea if they prorate charges if you use less than 1000 calls so lets assume they don't, so the minimum daily cost for a user is $0.24.
The way these things work nearly everywhere is that $0.24 for 1000 API calls means your cost in a given billing period for N API calls during a billing period is 0.24 ?N/1000? or 0.24 N/1000. The first is if they do not prorate, the second is if they do.
If it takes on average 345 requests per day per user, that would be 10 500 per month per user, which would be $2.64 per month per user if they do not prorate and $2.52 per month per user if they do prorate.
$300-500/mo seems very cheap to reliably contact 1000 users directly on their phones and have them respond in almost all cases.
It costs money because it's valuable. Sign up for one of the Tier 1 services and move on, if you can't justify the cost you need to reassess your product and/or its pricing.
Yo! Founder here - I am definitely still playing around with the pricing and this is really great feedback. I don't want the profit margin to be jarring - I want to keep the lights on for the business. Do you think the service itself should be cheaper or should I pay callers a larger amount?
Heh, I misread that. But I think that's still expensive. For example, the Google Maps API gives you 25,000 free calls per day and charges 50 cents per 1000 calls after that.
$17/mo is for 300 API calls per day - so that would be closer to 9,000 calls.
If you are looking to do more API calls than that there would definitely be cheaper pricing - especially if your use case involves sending requests as the user types!
I like the idea, but you guys really miss the mark on costs. I don't know where you got the idea that any small business or startup would be okay paying this. Definitely out of reach for 99% of the businesses out there.
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From the website:
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$999/month
Starting at $3.50+/case for most everything
Starting at $1.25/minute for a voice operator
8 hours of coverage, 5 days a week
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My small project handles about 30 cases per day, I spend about an hour on the phone with customers, .
Curious how you set the API call pricing tiers. It seems like this would not be contacted more than several times a day by builds and direct traffic would be free. I can’t imagine 500k calls unless I was serving your data uncached in a client app, but maybe that is a popular use case.
The cost per question seems super high. I can't even think of an API where a single call would cost $1cent. You better have a good pricing model to follow up on this.
Seems like people are missing the point of the question. Saying $1 is too expensive for 1000 calls without knowing what that API call does shows you're thinking in terms of value, not in terms of a pricing model that is favorable. The OP hasn't told us if he's doing ML calculations, spinning up machines, painting a Tesla, selling an airplane ticket or what. Think in terms of the pricing model only. Yes it would be nice to know what the service does, but the OP probably can't give that away.
This service is enormously convenient. I think I would be happy to pay one or two cents per minute of calling time. But I wonder what their long-term pricing idea for this would be.
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