History of Spot Instances spot.rackspace.com

From AWS's original auction-based market (2009-2017) to provider-managed pricing across all major clouds today. Documents how transparent bidding was replaced by opaque algorithms.

EU's Late Payment Directive single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu

European rules on applicable fees for late payments.

Pricing of Service in Clouds: Optimal Response and Strategic Interactions sigmetrics.org

“How should the consumer modulate its demand to optimize its profits? (…) How should the provider and consumer negotiate the specific pricing structure they will employ?” Covers non-linear models, tiered pricing, elastic demand, consumer et provider strategies.

Quantity discounts on a virtual good: The results of a massive pricing experiment sci-hub.st

“Implementing price reductions ranging from 9–70% for large purchases, we found remarkably little impact on revenue, either positively or negatively.” If discounts are a placebo and are still widely used in the industry, maybe they are a marketing hack to lure big customers?

Triple‐entry accounting with Blockchain: How far have we come? sci-hub.st

“Triple‐entry accounting is a new and a more efficient way to address fundamental trust and transparency issues that plague current accounting systems. Triple‐entry accounting with Blockchain, when properly implemented, can fundamentally improve accounting.”

The Anatomy of SaaS Pricing Strategy sbigrowth.com

Explain how to articulate the pricing of SaaS businesses around the product strategy.

SaaS pricing explorer saaspricingexplorer.hyperline.co

A collection of 1000+ pricing pages for inspiration.

Fraud in Telephony Networks s3.eurecom.fr

Most of telephony frauds gravitates around billing and the metering of micro-transactions. This paper feature a taxonomy (on page 6) differentiating the root causes, vulnerabilities, exploitation techniques, and the way fraudsters can benefits from them.

AWS EC2 T2 Instances Demystified: Don't Learn The Hard Way roberttisdale.com

An example of really tricky burstable instances which accrues and limits its own amount of CPU usage credits.

Business Model Patterns reasonstreet.co

A list of 15 different ways to sell products and services.

Why I Love Usage-Based Pricing rdegges.com

“The most important reason I like this pricing model is that it heavily incentivizes both the customer and the service provider to act in everyone's best interest.” Also details issues with other pricing models.

Pricing pages design pricingpages.design

A collection of pricing pages from various SaaS companies, to get inspiration on how to present your offers.

Practical Business Python pbpython.com

A blog collecting and spreading ideas on how to use Python more effectively in the business setting.

Incentive Engineering for Computational Resource Management papers.agoric.com

Paper exploring the “mechanisms for the allocation of processor time and storage that are compatible both with programming practice and with market mechanisms.”

Forecasting: Principles and Practice otexts.com

“Comprehensive introduction to forecasting methods and to present enough information about each method for readers to be able to use them sensibly.”

OpenTimestamps opentimestamps.org

Go beyond the solution above, and timestamp immutable document directly on Bitcoin's blockchain.

Algebraic Models for Accounting Systems openlibrary.org

Advanced abstract algebra applied to the analysis of accounting systems.

Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs: What You Really Need to Know About the Numbers openlibrary.org

Allows you to fully understand how to use financial data to make better decisions for your business.

Accounts Demystified: The Astonishingly Simple Guide To Accounting openlibrary.org

Helps you learn how to analyse and monitor your company's financial performance.

Open IBAN openiban.com

🆓 Free and public IBAN validation and calculation webservice.

Accounting Memento For Entrepreneurs (US GAAP) odoo.com

An interactive form to play with accounting concepts.

Pricing Psychology nickkolenda.com

Which numbers should you use? How high should it be? Should it be rounded? This guide has 42 tricks to help you choose the best price.

19 Tactics to Solve the Chicken-or-Egg Problem and Grow Your Marketplace nfx.com

“Which comes first, the supply or the demand? Chicken or egg?”

GCP Preemptible VMs vs AWS Spot Instances news.ycombinator.com

“Google's prices are fixed, whereas AWS uses a market model”.

What does the "Reverse Charge" refer to? news.ycombinator.com

Answer: a provision in which a business transfer the responsibility of VAT handling to the customer.

source news.ycombinator.com

) - Mechanical Turk's rake was “20% (…) on the reward and bonus amount”, with a minimum fee of $0.01 per bonus payment, so a 7-cent bonus is billed one cent instead of 1.4: an effective 14.3% instead of 20%. The requester's round_payment() snaps every payout onto the 5-cent…

Method to check if you swapped 2 digits news.ycombinator.com

Standard manual accounting trick employed when isolating an error in a double ledger.

source news.ycombinator.com

) - Google Ads used to implement a concept of capped actuals. A kind of monthly budget with rollover, which is an optimal billing scheme to limit surprises for customers. It always looked to me as a way to sell quotas.

source news.ycombinator.com

) - The direct filiation between old-school university mainframes and current cloud services.

Patents on billing systems of the dot-com era news.ycombinator.com

All of them have been abandoned and constitute prior art. This means there is nothing to prevent anybody to implement or commercialize these concepts.

source news.ycombinator.com

)

“Designing billing for a service can be really challenging” news.ycombinator.com

Personal anecdote on the design of the pricing plan for AWS Simple Email Service.

source news.ycombinator.com

) - Which allows them to claim the VAT on processing fees as input tax.

source news.ycombinator.com

) - Simple explanation of the bidding mechanism.

High failure rate of Point Of Sale devices in the upper Midwest news.ycombinator.com

The root cause? People wearing a lot of wool in low humidity air, generating a lot of static.

Use-cases for cloud services news.ycombinator.com

The reason usage-based pricing makes even more sense for cloud services: to optimize ROI, keep all regular workload in traditional architecture and reserve cloud computing for elastic and experimental projects.

On GCP invoiced billing news.ycombinator.com

Invoiced billing is a B2B-friendly payment happening after the service is consumed and an invoice issued. It seems to be a pain to setup on GCP but I suspect is a consequence of trying to reduce (costly) fraud.

source news.ycombinator.com

) - Users are seeking more transparency on the spot market.

Don't just roll the dice – Software pricing guide neildavidson.com

Huge and complete collection of pricing scheme, with their psychological effect and impact on revenue model.

Monzo's bank transfers post-mortem monzo.com

Or why you should be prepared for and work around gateway provider's outages.

Changing the Pricing Model monkeynoodle.org

A couple of ways to re-license your product.

How to Build an Insurance Company moderntreasury.com

The importance of payment ops architecture.

An Overview of Visa minesafetydisclosures.com

Great breakdown of Visa business models and metrics.

Usage Patterns and the Economics of the Public Cloud mc4f.ee

“We examine the economics of demand and supply in cloud computing. (…) These results explain why fixed prices currently prevail despite the seeming need for time-varying dynamics. Examining the actual CPU utilization provides a lens into the future. (…) demand fluctuations…

Tutorial on multiple currency accounting mathstat.dal.ca

An excellent resource for implementing multi-currency accounting systems.

Ten Ways Your Data Project is Going to Fail martingoodson.com

You don't need data scientists. “For ETL, hire data engineers. For reporting, hire BI analysts. The end.”

Accounting for Computer Scientists martin.kleppmann.com

Describes how to view accounting in the form of graphs in which money flows, then how these movements are materialized in the financial statements of a small company.

Time Series Prediction - A short introduction for pragmatists liip.ch

Great introduction on how time series can be used to evaluate business problems.

Constrain the marketplace lennysnewsletter.com

; Decide which side of the marketplace to concentrate on; Drive initial supply; Drive initial demand. A 4-parts series with dozen of interviews of people with direct experience building and scaling marketplaces.

How credit card thieves use free-to-play apps to launder gains kromtech.com

To prevent abuses, service provider must strengthen both credit card verification and the account creation process.