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.

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)}.

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.