UP
Gnosis affords a multitude of schemes for pricing services.
See (p2,account) about accounts
and (sdc) and (asset)
for more ideas.
If we wish to sell the service of some proprietary program
we need to establish a price and package the program to
support that price.
Most software pricing today is insensitive to the degree
of use. Most software sales presume that the program will
run on the user's machine. Such insensitive pricing limits
the market of many products.
Part of the success of commercial computer services is due
to their ability to price software according to use.
The solutions presented here are not currently compatible
with factory design. See (ch-fact)
about this.
One Cent Per Statement Compiled
Suppose we have a compiler for which we wish to charge
one cent per statement compiled.
Running Up a Tab
The traditional way is to build a domain in which the
compiler will run and to include in the memory tree of that
domain, write access to a page that may be read by a billing
program. As each statement is compiled a word in this page
is incremented.
Pre Paid
Perhaps a better way would be to package the compiler
in a domain with a word of storage that was not shared.
This word is initialized to 10,000 and it is decremented
as statements are compiled. The compiler compiles only
while the word is positive.
This domain can now be sold for $100.00.
This seemingly strange scheme allows one to pre charge, something
not really possible with most current commercial systems.
It also allows the compiler to be discreet {(p3,do)}.
Charging Only for New Code
Suppose that we have a compiler that is fast but does
not provide independent compilation and that we want to
compete with a compiler that has independent compilation.
We write a front end to the compiler that remembers (perhaps
using hashing techniques) what it has compiled. Lines of
text are charged for only the first time.