Caspio Removes Caps on Unlimited PaaS Pricing Plan

It’s like cloud providers are engaging in a cutthroat limbo contest as they continue to ask each other, “How low can you go?” As we noted last week, cloud providers seem to be engaging in a price war, but the truth is as price cuts happen, others simply follow suit. And it’s not just the big boys playing the game. Some of the small and midsize players are also reducing prices in what is quickly becoming the norm in the cloud computing space.

Take Caspio as a good example. The PaaS provider has announced a new pricing plan to remove the pay-per-usage model most cloud providers pride themselves on in favor of a “one price fits all” plan. Caspio, which provides a PaaS for custom business applications, has removed all caps on applications, users, storage and email messages within its new Standard pricing plan.

Under the new plan, Caspio is providing its customers, many of which are apps developers, with all of its platform’s features and resources to enable them to create unlimited applications. It’s almost like a return of old-school software pricing models, but with a cloud computing subscription element. Not that it’s a bad thing, as it could really make cloud costs very predictable for heavy users.

An “unlimited usage” model isn’t really new to Caspio, though. The vendor has provided its customers with such pricing plans since its founding in 2000, it noted in a prepared statement.

Its latest pricing plan focuses on giving customers a usage-based pricing model that the company claims reduces barriers to adoption while maximizing economices of scale available from cloud technologies.

“The cloud has given companies an opportunity to simplify their software delivery and break free from old user-based pricing models. Interestingly, vendors such as Salesforce.com, despite all their leadership claims, have firmly held on to outdated enterprise pricing that deteriorates the promise of the cloud,” said Frank Zamani, Caspio founder and CEO, in a prepared statement. “We believe that usage-based pricing is as crucial as the cloud delivery itself, and we are proud to be at the forefront of this model since our beginnings in 2000.”

The new Caspio Standard Plan is priced at $249 per month. Although it doesn’t immediately seem to be usage-based pricing, the plan is as such based on its transfer rates. Beyond the 1GB per month of transfer, which Caspio noted is adequate for most users, Standard pricing for additional bandwidth starts $50 per Gigabyte.