welcome: please sign in

Diff for "PaymentPlanProposals"

Differences between revisions 3 and 4
Revision 3 as of 2006-07-24 01:58:18
Size: 3950
Comment:
Revision 4 as of 2006-07-24 02:00:31
Size: 3942
Comment:
Deletions are marked like this. Additions are marked like this.
Line 8: Line 8:

=== Description ===
Line 14: Line 16:
=== Pros and Cons ===
Line 16: Line 19:


=== Description ===


=== Pros and Cons ===

1. Payment Plan Proposals

Different ideas have been proposed about the best way to adjust member fees. This page will contain a summary of the plans that have been proposed. When adding or editing a plan here, remember that HCoop will have to 1) cover an increase in operating costs during our migration to a new infrastructure (although nearly all of the hardware that we need has been donated at this point) 2) figure out how to adjust costs on a longer-term basis once membership increases.

With that, the proposals (in alphabetical order, please update if you change the names of the plans :) ):

1.1. AAA Tiered Pricing

1.1.1. Description

Akin to standard professional hosting services, multiple hosting "plans" are offered for a flat rate.

Since we are a cooperative, these rates would be determined by the distribution of actual usage levels and tweaked as necessary. Rates could be set to enable some retained earnings for future investments or maintenance.

A simple compromise alterative is to simply offer an opt-in plan for the lowest-usage members at a flat rate. This was discussed in NathanKennedy 's email on this subject on hcoop-discuss.

1.1.2. Pros and Cons

  • Pro: Predictable dues for members who cannot afford large payments and have minimal requirements.
  • Pro: More "fair", in that members contribution is tied to their usage of HCoop resources.

1.2. Flat-Rate

1.2.1. Description

Each member pays the same amount every month. Feature sets and bandwidth allowances are basically what we can support given our software tools and what our colocation plan gives us. Member sites may be re-evaluated at any time if their bandwidth or disk usage increases dramatically, and the cooperative at that time could decide to either charge the member more for their higher utilization or subsidize the site with existing member dues and resources.

This plan recognizes that some members may leave because of a temporary increase in the flat-rate price during our migration to a new infrastructure. For this reason, the plan can be modified for a short time to allow donations by some members to subsidize the dues of those who can't afford a higher flat-rate until the membership increases to allow the cooperative to once again be affordable for all of our members.

In this plan, the membership rate would settle (post server-migration) to something that included a budget for concrete operating costs as well as a fund for repairs and upgrades.

Although this plan would be rather expensive for a few months compared to commercial offerings, our quality of services should be higher because of the better-quality hardware and bandwidth that we will have access to. Additionally, we already offer a broader feature set than most commercial offerings and will continue this in our new infrastructure. Finally, it is felt that after prices settle, we could reduce our monthly costs to something that most members could accept, in the range of $5 - $8 per month, US. The exact rate that we settle on would be TBD at a later date and able to be revised later to reflect changing operating costs and estimated future expenditures.

1.2.2. Pros and Cons

  • Pro: all users have the full set of features that they may need to develop dynamic web sites.
  • Pro: allows the cooperative to either subsidize sites that benefit the internet community or which may draw desirable traffic to the cooperative.
  • Con: some members may feel that they're paying for something that they're not using.
  • Con: Essentially regressive. Members with the least usage and potentially the least ability to pay subsidize members with above average, even grossly excessive usage.
  • Con: Lowest usage members may leave for services that provide better value. In particular, some members simply cannot afford "flat rate" dues.

1.3. Shares

1.3.1. Description

1.3.2. Pros and Cons

PaymentPlanProposals (last edited 2008-07-07 04:28:14 by localhost)