

Amazon DevPay - chewbranca
http://aws.amazon.com/devpay/

======
pdx
I've used DevPay. My experiences were generally positive. My problems with it
were as follows.

1) Amazon doesn't expect one user to buy your service more than one time.
Frankly, I didn't expect it either when I started the service or I would have
structured it differently. I ended up having to give people free 2nd accounts
when they asked for them, since I had no way to bill them for a 2nd account.
User would sign up for my service (twitter related), like it, and decide they
wanted their other twitter account to also use my service. So they would come
back to my site, sign up again with their other twitter user name, I'd send
them to Amazon to pay, and they'd get an error, since they had "already
purchased that item".

2) Ending the service. When I decided to end the service, I went to try to
cancel my devpay billing, so they would just stop billing all my users. This
was an email procedure, not a form, which was weird. The email response I got
was unsatisfactory to me.

    
    
         Per your request, we have denied your product. New customers will not be able 
         to sign up for your product any more. Please note, however, that your product 
         has customers who have signed up already. These customers will continue to get
         billed for their use of your product. If you don?t want your customers to use
         your application, please contact them and have them unsubscribe from your 
         application by going to http://www.amazon.com/dp-applications.
    

I still have customers paying, since I can't cancel them, all I can do is tell
them to cancel themselves. I feel guilty when I see them continue to pay for a
discontinued service.

3) I had a general feeling that I was losing some customers due to them not
having an Amazon account. I have no actual data to back that up.

All in all, it worked as advertised, but I think I won't use it again.

~~~
biturd
What percentage of your users are still paying yet do not use or do not have
access to the service?

I did dev work for a client, service based site, $10.00 a month. I put in some
simple tracking reports to let me know a users login history. I found that
high percentages of users paid, logged in once, and never logged in again.
This struck me as odd because the service was by nature something if you paid
for, you would need to login to use it. It was not a trick to get someone to
sign up for a site that adds no new value over time.

What was really interesting is the ~14% of users that only logged in once,
ever, but still were paying every month on their credit card. 14% seems really
high. I wonder if AOL has the same 14% of users not dialing in but paying for
dial up still.

I also found ~5% (guesstimate) go right for a chargeback, do not contact
support, and do not click the very easy to find "Refunds" tab that allows a
one click full account deletion of all data, refund of the partial month,
(which was moved to charging at the end of service, instead of up front).

Users purchase habits are indeed strange.

~~~
DenisM
Friend of mine told me she didn't cancel her wow account for many months after
she stopped playing. it's just something people do, I guess...

------
nephics
It is a shame that not even Amazon is challenging PayPal's monopoly in Europe.
Neither Amazon DevPay nor Amazon Simple Pay is available in Europe, and Google
Checkout is only available in the UK.

~~~
davidw
Amazon doesn't strike me as being the best of the bunch in terms of i18n,
really. Here in Italy, their presence is kind of limited in terms of
countries/languages where they are present: only Germany, France and UK.
Granted, it's more difficult for a company trucking in physical products to
move into new markets, but they seem to be taking their sweet time about it.

Google is a bit better, but still strikes me as very US-centric in some ways.

------
rbranson
I'm confused as to why this is being posted, the service has been available
since 2008.

~~~
chewbranca
I hadn't heard of it before so I figured others might not have either.

More importantly, with the introduction of micro instances, this creates a
very low barrier of entry into creating a service behind a paywall. I'm
looking to do just that, so I'm also curious to hear other people's
experiences with DevPay.

~~~
gxti
In my experience micro instances are not suitable for on-demand services since
they have no reserved CPU and frequently stop responding for minutes at a
time. They're basically a way for Amazon to sell excess RAM to grid computing
customers. On the other hand, I tested them a few days after they first became
available and was just experimenting with them as a way to test scalability of
a product, so things may have changed since then.

------
deskamess
Looks like your customers have to have an Amazon account before they can
purchase. How would you sell such a concept to a company if they do not have
an amazon account?

Perhaps I am reading it wrong...

""" Embed this link in your web site to allow your customers to purchase your
product through Amazon. Customers can sign in with their Amazon.com
credentials and select a credit card that is stored in their Amazon.com
account. After your customers purchase your application, they are directed
back to your web site. """

~~~
bartman
You're reading it right. You send them through Amazon, where they log in with
their usual Amazon credentials and can check your rates. When they confirm the
purchase, they are redirected back to your page with their authentication
tokens as URL parameters.

Without an Amazon account they can't purchase, although in my experiences this
hasn't been brought up as a problem by potential customers.

------
bartman
The main notion of DevPay is to act "on behalf of" a user, in order to
outsource billing to Amazon while using the common AWS APIs. Once a user signs
up to your service using DevPay you get a custom Access and Secret Key that's
bound to this user and allows you to do all S3 actions while he's billed.

Unfortunately this hasn't been introduced for EC2 - they only allow Paid AMIs
and no way to start these for your users without having their AWS credentials.

~~~
chewbranca
Ahhhh interesting, so it doesn't provide you with a generic payment system,
but instead provides you with a way to meter content on S3 or the use of an
AMI.

That's still an interesting service model, where you charge users on resource
consumption rather than on a per item basis. I wonder how well this would work
for an image or video processing service or other similar services.

~~~
smhinsey
It's been awhile since I checked, but there was also a limitation that meant
you could only associate a DevPay ID with an S3-backed AMI, ruling out the
more useful EBS-backed AMIs.

------
tlack
I guess I had missed this when they rolled it out. It definitely gives me some
new ideas about leasing value-added EC2 instances to others.

~~~
JeffJenkins
Yes, though be careful since Amazon is slowly rolling out a lot of generic
services themselves.

------
zmmmmm
If DevPay worked outside of the US I would be using it for my product today.
Since it doesn't, I'm not. And that is probably not a bad thing because it has
caused me to build my software in a much more generic way which means I'm not
dependent on EC2 either - and in fact, I'm now saving money because EC2 is
fairly expensive compared to the other options I now have, including running
on some of my in house capacity where it makes sense.

------
charlief
Related post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315819>

~~~
chewbranca
Not much content in that thread. Has any used this since then? I'm interested
to hear from people who have used it. I'm not seeing a whole lot about it in
general, seems DevPay got some interest in 2008 and then faded off.

~~~
charlief
Understood, but probably would have been better posed as an Ask HN submission.

~~~
chewbranca
Agreed. I wasn't aware this was around since 2008 when I initially posted as I
hadn't heard of it before. I figured this had already gotten a fair bit of
interest so I would just let it go rather than changing it after the fact to
an Ask HN post.

------
f1gm3nt
Has anyone used this?

~~~
scrollinondubs
Yes. We had rolled out a Devpay-backed product called "Cloud Gear" about a
year ago and ended up pulling it off the shelf due primarily to two
irreconcilable issues: 1\. their accounting process appeared to have some
fundamental innacuracies at the time. We tracked the launching of instances
and our numbers did not match up with theirs. There was anomalous usage
behavior and Amazon eventually admitted there had been tracking glitches on
their end - difficult to deliver a service if the underlying accounting can't
be trusted. Note: this may have been (likely has been) remedied since but it
was problematic around January '10. 2\. As another commenter noted, the signup
process for a newcomer was too much to ask of someone who didn't already
happen to have an AWS account. And even for those who did it was still a
cumbersome hamster maze to put them through and undoubtedly hurt the adoption
numbers.

#1 has likely been resolved. #2 is inherent to this type of on-behalf-of
arrangement. It is an interesting model and could definitely enable some
innovative services. We just found it not ready for primetime when we had
tested it back in late '09-early'10.

------
nivertech
What's the difference between DevPay and Paid AMIs?

