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Greg McCarroll
on Mon Feb 12 2007 09:32:17 GMT+0000 (BST)
We’re talking about what the next steps for Zimki should be a lot at the moment and one of the options that excites me the most is the separation of the billing system and the JavaScript hosting aspects of Zimki into two products.
This would allow other people to use our billing system for their own products, most likely utility or software as a service (SaaS) endeavors. Basically someone could take a piece of software, offer it as a service and let us handle the billing for them, simply sending them a cheque at the end of the month.
What I really like about this is that it’s potentially a great option for open source projects to get some funding. Take a project that’s maybe a timekeeping application or a project management tool, host it, allow users to sign up and then outsource your billing to “Zimki-billing”.
Just last week I personally signed up for a hosted subversion service and I’m really happy with the software (well I knew what subversion was like already) and the service – the only bit that annoys me is the fact that there is one price for less than 100 MB’s of storage per month and one price for the 100 MB to 1000 MB band and I reckon I’m going to come in at 101 MB. It’s in a situation like this that utility pricing shines. However, many small companies currently outsource their billing to services that are geared up to fixed amount charging not utility charging.
“Zimki-billing” would not only offer an alternative to this, but also maybe lower the barriers to entry into delivering SaaS as well.
Anyway It’s just one of the ideas floating around, so It may or may not happen, I hope it does.
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