I’m sorry but this sounds like an awful
I’m sorry but this sounds like an awful decision to completely eliminate rental (especially if you cannot even provide the statistics backing your decision). Subscription models are the tried and true business model of many companies for a reason. Sunsetting it just to go all in on AI MCP hype train sounds like a poorly thought through idea.
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Thanks @aydin, @pavel, @xMiso, and everyone for your contributions to this discussion - I've created this thread for us to continue it because I don't think that it's over. I am grateful for all the feedback you've already shared and continue to share, and would love to keep the conversation open. Right now, rentals are still an option, but the push is in place and we need to make sure that if this is something that is going to happen, we do everything we can to make it work for everyone.
Please share your use-cases with us so we can colour in the internal picture of rentals, and maybe come up with a solution (or solutions) that work better for as many people as possible.
My use case is not all my users are developers and want to sit there with a calculator just to figure out how much money they’re going to pay in the end
Or a real estate brokerage who wants to pay for my real estate service wants to know exactly how much they’ll be paying month to month for the service so its clean on their books and there’s no surprise costs at the end of month (and is easier to sell leadership on as a value add). In their sell to leadership its “it costs $30/mo” vs “it costs $0.002 per X $0.07 per Y and $0.5 per docker startup”. Uhm, what?
Plus I get paid consistent revenue monthly.
If these things aren’t inherently obvious I’m genuinely concerned for the future at Apify
Why don’t you guys run a survey on getting rid of rentals/subscriptions in favor of PPE and see how popular that idea is among both your developers and your users? I’m fairly positive that it won’t be
Well. Idk if you know or not.
Users pay $30 + variable platform cost right now and it’s feels so less transparent to them in the current setup.
They have to, do exactly what you said they don’t want to do, calculate how much they have to pay on the top of the current pricing of an Actor.
I get your point though, lets see how it goes 🙂
I'll add my bit to this discussion. Say my use case is creating special actors for specific public using my own know how. I want the user pay for that know how but not to discourage him by charging him per results/events/rows. In fact I don't care how much results he gets, point is he uses my know how. How should I then set the pricing? I would really accept pay per rental version where DEVELOPER is charged for any additional costs, I have absolutely no problem with that because I can manage the costs by adjusting the code or price myself.
@xMiso just advanced to level 6! Thanks for your contributions! 🎉
And the second point is consistent revenue as aydin already mentioned, if I set rental price low enough then residual income for these highly specific, highly targeted actors is by magnitude higher than it would ever be with any other payment option. In fact this is only way how to offer cheap service for private requests - look at my Wordpress vulnerabilities scanner plugin or Light Pattern Scraper which were created on request. No way I'd ever made a dime on them because both are used/non-used by only ONE customer. And only now after few months I got maybe finally paid for creating these. So now tell me what would be working model for these if you abandon rental....
I think for a user paying $39/month choosing a $9/month rental feels comfortable and attractive. But when the only option is a PPE model at $2 per run, he will naturally become more cautious — even if he runs the actor once a month in the end. It’s really about value perception and basic psychology. Revenue difference will be $9 vs $2 and less money for both dev and apify. Hope you guys at apify can undestand this 🙏
@xMiso - could you create a special “developer knowledge fee” event and charge for that one time somewhere at the start to cover your use-case?
@ellativity - could Apify develop a special type of “maintenance” fee event? It would allow the developer to charge some fixed amount on a set schedule (like monthly) irrespective of actor actually running or not. The pricing could be shown on the UI in a separate section similar to how you currently render the actor startup charge. It could potentially be a win-win for everyone because the developer can set a fixed fee and users do not need to pay for usage costs. In my observation, rental fees are typically around 20usd, while platform usage charges would be about 1 dollar or less. In this scenario, it would be an acceptable trade off.
@pavel just advanced to level 7! Thanks for your contributions! 🎉
I echo the sentiment of @pavel and @xMiso. Especially when it comes to non-technical users. For example we have a virtual staging actor, that would be fantastic for real estate agents, but the $500 per 1000 looks very intimidating to them.
I'd rather have them pay a monthy rental + API usage
Yeah agree this is confusing as hell to look at ^
Can barely tell what its asking me as a developer