>With fixed pricing tiers I know that's when I'm at the lower usage end I'm paying over the odds, and when I'm at the upper end I have the problem you describe of not wanting to exceed my usage and move up a large price-step.
True, that can be an issue, as well, but once you're an enterprise at a sufficiently large size and are pretty much always guaranteed to be in the highest tier anyway, the flat monthly price can often be a lot less costly.
For the record, the main product I'm referring to in this case is Splunk. Excellent product that I love using (and still often use the free tier of for personal use), but I know a lot of companies have moved away from it due to the cost.
I think logging doesn't necessarily scale that closely with company size, revenue, how many people are using the product, how many actual machines you have, etc. A competent, motivated, small team at a small company with not that many systems could end up logging a lot more events per day than a much bigger team at a much bigger company with many more systems. Especially if the team is specifically focused on logging for security purposes.
And in this case, the variable pricing is arbitrary rather than a response to an actual increase in cost: the product is hosted on-site and maintained internally, with us also covering costs for the server cluster and resources, so it's not like there's any kind of marginal cost for the company based on how much we log.
I don't think it's necessarily a bad pricing strategy in terms of what can generate the most revenue for their company, or that it's unfair or underhanded or that they don't deserve it or anything like that, but I and some other people who spent most of our day working with it just began to find it frustrating.
True, that can be an issue, as well, but once you're an enterprise at a sufficiently large size and are pretty much always guaranteed to be in the highest tier anyway, the flat monthly price can often be a lot less costly.
For the record, the main product I'm referring to in this case is Splunk. Excellent product that I love using (and still often use the free tier of for personal use), but I know a lot of companies have moved away from it due to the cost.
I think logging doesn't necessarily scale that closely with company size, revenue, how many people are using the product, how many actual machines you have, etc. A competent, motivated, small team at a small company with not that many systems could end up logging a lot more events per day than a much bigger team at a much bigger company with many more systems. Especially if the team is specifically focused on logging for security purposes.
And in this case, the variable pricing is arbitrary rather than a response to an actual increase in cost: the product is hosted on-site and maintained internally, with us also covering costs for the server cluster and resources, so it's not like there's any kind of marginal cost for the company based on how much we log.
I don't think it's necessarily a bad pricing strategy in terms of what can generate the most revenue for their company, or that it's unfair or underhanded or that they don't deserve it or anything like that, but I and some other people who spent most of our day working with it just began to find it frustrating.