mark on Tue Sep 26 2006 15:38:15 GMT+0100 (GMT)

"How much is it going to cost?" is one of the most common questions we asked got on the Zimki stand. The answer we gave out - one of our typically honest answers - is We don't know yet.

One of the things we want to do before we set that price in stone is give developers a chance to play with the system. It's only a month since we quietly soft-launced and EuroOSCON was our first big outing.

We want to make sure whatever price we set is fair; Not only fair for us but, more importantly, fair for you. Essentially what we're trying to do is offer a price that truly reflects our costs. And to do this, we'll need to get some idea of how people are using the system in the real world, rather than just taking a stab in the dark based on what we've been doing with Zimki. I fully expect people to develop applications for Zimki that we'd never dreamt of, and we want to ensure that a fair price is being charged for that doesn't prevent people from doing cool stuff just because we've set the pricing wrong.

We also want to avoid a subscription model. In any subscription based system people who use the service less subsidise the people who use it more. We'd like to get to a state where people are only charged when they consume significant resources – hopefully around the time that their application is generating income…

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