You may want to consider rethinking the metered billing model. Geeks love them, particularly if the algorithm to calculate the price is spiffy. I have yet to see evidence that people who pay for stuff like them.
Here's an anecdote for you: our industry is going cloud cloud cloud right now and I am pushing it internally. Enthusiasm among management for test projects is high -- I'm presenting one today, actually.
(I rewrote an internal app on the App Engine. It took two days for a prototype, will take two more for getting it production-ready, total cost and schedule less than 10% of when we had more senior, more talented engineers implement the version we are actually using.)
So in this process of "Hey, we don't have to actually host hardware here!" evangelism I actually tried to get a purchase order for Slicehost approved for a different project, where I said something to the effect of "It is going to cost us X,000 yen when I'm in development, and X0,000 yen when we move it to production, and Y0,000 yen if this app gets really popular internally."
This purchasing request broke my manager.
He told me that he'd rather get a request for ten times the highest price I quoted, than try to figure out how he was supposed to incorporate conditional logic into his budget and reporting forecasts for this quarter.
Are you sure you don't want to be selling my manager the low-cognitive-pain, easy-to-buy, ten-times-more-expensive version?
$0.35 per 1000 points - first 50,000 points sent
Boom, you just broke my manager. Not only are you requiring forecasting and conditional logic from him, you're requiring math.
Small Business: $20
Web Application: $100
Enterprise : Call Us
There, now we have an unbroken manager. I ask for $100 a month (not because we need it but because my manager won't approve the Small Business so I won't bother asking), he asks "Are you sure we aren't Enterprise?", I say "Yeah, I did the math", he says "OK, approved."
[Edited to add:
Incidentally, in my own business I'm a stats junkie. There are currently three types of tracking scripts on my pages, plus my rolled-my-own bits, and you very well might be #4.
That said: I pay $19 a month for CrazyEgg, which has given me some very valuable insights into user behavior in the past, so valuable that I continue paying for it on a monthly basis despite not actually using it in most given months.
At the moment, for example, I think I have no experiments actually running.
Now, hypothetically if I were already using MixPanel and savoring that time you made me a thousand dollars by increasing my conversion rate, but didn't currently have an experiment running, you might not be making money from me. That is sort of suboptimal for you, isn't it? I'm willing to pay you for nothing if you have previously delivered wins to me and if I think I might get another win at an unspecified point in the future. This dynamic has earned CrazyEgg about $250 of free money from me. Do you want free money? ;) ]
You may want to consider rethinking the metered billing model. I have yet to see evidence that people who pay for stuff like them.
How about Amazon's cloud services? Lots of people pay for those.
Your story is sad but it sounds like the problem might be more the relationship between you and your manager rather than a problem with all cloud servies.
Quick plug for zuora.com, started by ex-salesforce people (I'm not connected w/them). They make cloud billing models easier for purchasing to swallow. And yes, they're a SaaS provider themselves.
