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0 pointsplasma6y ago0 comments

Hey azhawkes; I've used loader.io and a few other services to do load tests.

For all of them, I wish I had a "pay for credits" model, where I could just pay for each load test I ran, instead of a subscription.

Load tests for me were infrequent and feature/ad-hoc/test-case specific, so I wish I had a billing model that fit my use case.

Wish you the best!

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azhawkes6y ago

Thanks!! The Loadster Fuel option is just that, where you buy a bunch of "fuel" (credits) and use it whenever you need to run tests. Each unit of fuel is enough to run 1 virtual user for 1 hour and it never expires.

Loadster's revenue split is something like 70/30 between MRR and Fuel. As the founder, of course, I love MRR, but many customers are like you and load testing is an occasional activity where it wouldn't make sense to have a recurring commitment.

I do always wonder how much friction it causes having two separate pricing models... pricing is hard.

nathan_f776y ago

Thanks for sharing your experience! I've been thinking about adding a credit system to my PDF generation product [1], so that people can perform one-time batch jobs, or for companies that have very seasonal workloads. I agree that recurring revenue is the best, but there's also nothing stopping people from suspending their account if they don't need it anymore. I haven't had anyone do that so far, so maybe this would be the wrong direction.

[1] https://formapi.io

rlonn6y ago

At Load Impact we faced this issue also: us wanting a predictable revenue stream, and the customers often preferring a pay-as-you-go model. In my mind you should always be customer-centric and offer what the customers want. Otherwise someone else will.

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