create a new pricing model
Charge very little for basic database (say $2/DB), and then charge me for storage size (say $0.50/GB/month) and usage (say $1.00/1M logical IOPs) - so I can start off small, and pay for usage.
Piyush Lumba
shared this idea
Tuesday we released new database pricing. The smallest DB (100MB) is now $5/month. For more details http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/
10 comments
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craig
commented
As other people have said, billing in $1 for 100mb increments rather than starting at $10 will be major boon for SAAS multi tenant applications.
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Fahad Khan
commented
$1 for 100 MB
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pmonte
commented
Or even keep the prices as they are now ($9,99/1GB, $49.95/5GB, etc) but let us use and split these GBs on n databases. i.e. $9,99 per 1GB space regardless the number of databases.
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chi
commented
As a small business user, I can certainly see the benefit of renting smaller databases.
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Joseph Hui
commented
I 100% agree. Allowing small SQL instances will essentially remove the need to convert a SaaS App's single tenant database structure to become multi-tenant. Size beyond 100MB should be charged in $1 increments.
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crpietschmann
commented
A new Edition called "Micro" could be created that allows for smaller databases to be created that have sizes of either 200MB or 500MB. It could be charges at a rate of $1 per 100MB, so 200MB database would be $2/mo and 500MB database would be $5/mo. There are plenty of usage scenarios where you need a database, but the database size will never get near 1GB, and if it did you could just convert it to a Web Edition database as needed.
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Simon Lampen
commented
This is important for multi-tenant design where we have one db per customer rather than all customers in one db.
We want to allow each customer to be able to restore their data to a point in time, take copies of there data offline to their premise, be able to write simple queries... but we don't want to reinvent all these features just to have all our customers in one db.
These features as what single dbs are best at and it seems silly to have to reinvent them just to fit an inflexible pricing model.
So we would love to be able to have dbs of any size (but particularly small dbs), where we pay for the size they occupy and/or their IO. -
Joannes Vermorel
commented
I strongly agree, it would be top notch for multi-tenant apps, where each tenant gets a small DB. I would suggest 100MB instance at $1 / month.
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dan
commented
I run a lot of smaller systems. I'm tempted to start naming tables in such a way as to keep them separated in a single db, but I just don't want to " rewrite our entire app to match SQLAzure's commercial model" ( I couldn't say it better myself).
If I were to do that, if that client ever wanted to go "in house" or just get another IT contractor, I'd be spending a lot of time ripping out their DB. Also, many have private information and would be horrified if their database was joined with other clients (even if it is "virtual", the likelihood of one of my interns writing a script that may pull from the wrong table and a competitor picking some data is a bit too high for me to be comfortable. I can't afford to lose clients and certainly can't afford to get sued by a bunch of doctors and dentists.
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HR
commented
This is a serious cost issue for us. We are a small ISV and our multi-tenant implementation means that this is a significant barrier to us using SQL Azure. We won't rewrite our entire app to match SQLAzure's commercial model!
