- Create an AWS account for each user, and start them in an AWS free tier[1] micro instance. Let them decide when to upgrade to a bigger box, how much to spend.
- Put your images on AWS marketplace[2]. Then customers pay Amazon, and Amazon will pay you your markup.
B. Sample projects! Make some demo videos to give the general idea, and when a person creates a new account, let them try out some sample projects, just to get a feel for the system. After I register my only option is "create new project".
I'm also in Seattle, happy
to discuss, buy you lunch. Contact info in my profile.
Since the project is 100% open source, I'm not sure this would make much money. Do you have experience with marketplace images that are 100% open source?
Your idea about automated subscribing customers is interesting and likely to generate revenue... but wouldn't they pay Amazon instead of SageMath, Inc., which wouldn't support further development?
I would keep your onboarding/signup process intact. I'm just suggesting Marketplace as a back-end billing mechanism where premium users pay hourly usage charges, their cards are billed by Amazon, and Amazon sends you a check for your percentage markup. (you define the percentage markup over standard EC2 prices, and that markup goes to you).
They're still your users. The biggest benefit is Amazon paying for the free instances for the free users. And Amazon WANTs this. They WANT people to get hooked on using cloud services.
You might even have a mode where the expensive node is only allocated when a big computation kicks off. Hours are way cheaper than months.
This is another great idea. AWS is not so expensive for the types of calculations SMC is doing, and distributing computation costs to users is very reasonable. Another item people might start writing into their grants: x dollars in computation time on SMC, with part going to AWS (oh well) and part to you/Sage.
A. Turn your billing model inside out.
- Create an AWS account for each user, and start them in an AWS free tier[1] micro instance. Let them decide when to upgrade to a bigger box, how much to spend.
- Put your images on AWS marketplace[2]. Then customers pay Amazon, and Amazon will pay you your markup.
B. Sample projects! Make some demo videos to give the general idea, and when a person creates a new account, let them try out some sample projects, just to get a feel for the system. After I register my only option is "create new project". I'm also in Seattle, happy to discuss, buy you lunch. Contact info in my profile.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/free/
[2] https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/management/tour/