Emoncms thinking of billing sometime in 2018-2019

[Mustang65]

Not sure if you have already read this

Emoncms billing and scale: emoncms.org1 has grown significantly over the past few years. Significant investment in server storage, processing and development time will be required in the coming years to continue scaling to meet demand. In the last 12 months the number of active users has grown from 2,400 to 3,500 and the number of active feeds from 28,000 to 38,000. We would like to add further storage servers, optimise the front end and input processing load to enable further scaling. We project emoncms.org1 costs to rise to £6k for servers and ~£32k for development and administration this year (including the addition of one dedicated full time emoncms.org1 developer). Our present proposal is to implement a pay-per-feed model with costs in the region of £1-2 per feed per year. For customers of OpenEnergyMonitor hardware, emoncms.org1 accounts will be automatically credited with credit based on a percentage of total order spend, e.g a full EmonPi costing £153 may result in £31 (20%) of emoncms.org1 credit providing 3-5 years of free use for 6 feeds. Exact feed cost have not yet been finalised, these figures above are likely to change over the coming months as we assess the impact of different costs. We realise that this is a significant change and that some expectation of service is assumed when buying a hardware product, we are also glad that for those where a payment model will not work, emoncms is open source software that can be self hosted, which is also something we encourage. All emonPi’s will continue to be shipped with Emoncms pre-installed of course, enabling easy local logging if required. Emoncms credit will be applied retrospectively for past OpenEnergyMonitor shop order spend.