

Ask HN: Have any successful businesses been built around Amazon Devpay? - pprasad


======
cschmidt
I know one good example. Gurobi (<http://www.gurobi.com/>) sells a very
advanced Linear Programming (LP) and Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP)
solver. The software is more than 10K+ for a license. They use paid AMI's that
let you run their software for $4-8/hour, depending on the instance size (High
Memory Extra Large to High Memory Quadruple Extra Large).

I imagine is it a good way for them to get over the chicken and egg problem.
It is hard for developers to convince their managers that it will solve their
problem without trying it, and they can't try it without the software. It also
allows people like me to experiment with Gurobi without much up front cost.

------
jasonkester
I use DevPay for S3stat.

They built it as a way to upsell Amazon Web Services, but I don't use it that
way. It turns out that it's also a dead-simple way to handle recurring
payments for a web application. It's orders of magnitude less work to
implement than Amazon's other payment services.

The downside is that they don't put much love into it. Obvious features, such
as manually cancelling a subscription or being notified when somebody cancels
are missing, so there is a bit of pain to offset the ease of getting it up and
running.

That said, I'd use it again.

