Subscriptions aren't enough for SaaS companies, we're now moving towards credits
6 aosaigh 4 9/4/2025, 10:28:48 PM
I just got an email from Netlify talking about their upcoming shift from fixed-priced subscriptions to a credit-based subscription.
You now pay for credits. When your credits run out, your website stops.
What counts towards credits?
- Deploys
- Compute hours
- Form submission
- Bandwidth
- Requests
Is this the next greedy evolution of subscription-based pricing?
Some things cost less than others
AWS (and every other cloud provider I can think of) does this with their pricing - bandwidth (fully-internal, cross region, external...), compute (EC2, Lambda...), storage (S3, EBS, local NVMe...), and more
Sounds like you have now gotten a clearer mechanism to understanding usage, so you can maximize your utilization, and you want to have an opaque view instead
A subscription is basically an 'all you can eat buffet', and people are hungry.
Only way to get more money is to go 'sushi conveyer plate' model. And surprise, we won't tell you how many plates you eat till we tell you "pay more".