Make Money Fast - Introducing Amazon DevPay

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you may recall my Ka-Ching post this past summer. In the course of announcing the Amazon Flexible Payments Service, I also tried to make clear the fact that we are doing our best to enable and encourage developers to build profitable businesses around our line of web services.

We are now taking another big step in that direction with the introduction of Amazon DevPay. This new service allows entrepreneurial developers to wrap their own business models around Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2, taking advantage of Amazon's existing customer base and billing infrastructure. With DevPay, developers can focus on being creative and innovative while dispatching the less-than-glamorous aspects of dealing with bank accounts, credit cards, and so forth to us.

Developers use DevPay's web-based registration interface to create pricing plans for their applications, monitor customer signups, and track usage. The developer's customers use another web-based interface to sign up and enter payment information for the applications that they wish to use.

You can think of DevPay as an enabling technology for our other services. As as developer you will spend most of your time working with the other AWS services while counting on DevPay to allow you to monetize your hard work.

One thing that I really love about DevPay is the fact that it builds on years and years of work in a multitude of areas! We've been putting the building blocks in place for a long time. Starting from Amazon's early focus on providing customers with a great online experience, to the creation of our ever-growing line of scalable and powerful web services, we can now measure and bill Amazon customers for the use of applications built by our 290,000-strong developer community. We've taken what we know about creating a great online shopping experience and applied it to every aspect of DevPay, from the application registration and purchase pipelines to the user billing statement and the developer information dashboard.

Like all of our services, DevPay offers a lot of flexibility. You can create your own pricing plan for your EC2 AMIs or your S3 objects using any combination of one-time charges, recurring monthly charges, and metered Amazon Web Service usage. You have total flexibility to price your applications either higher or lower than your AWS usage.

DevPay includes a complete "pipeline" (series of web pages) for you to use as part of your application's sign up process. When your customers travel through the pipeline they will sign in to their Amazon account, choose a payment method, agree to the pricing plan and gain access to the application using a private identifier generated by DevPay.

Your customers will be billed for usage of their DevPay-powered applications on the first day of each month. We will then deduct a 3% fee plus another 30 cents, and deposit the remainder in your DevPay account. We will then charge your account for the usage of the Amazon services. You can transfer the profits (your DevPay balance) to your bank account whenever you want. You will also be able to log in to the DevPay portal to check on the status of your business at any point.

You can also use DevPay with your Amazon S3 applications. If your application adds value above and beyond raw storage (backup, indexing, personalization, or recommendations all come to mind) you can charge more than the base prices for storage and bandwidth.

You can adjust your pricing plan at any point if need be. DevPay even allows you to customize the email notification that will be sent to your customers when this happens. This is another way that our focus on customers really comes through, and it is one less thing that you will have to do yourself.

We've already got two interesting examples of DevPay in action...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is now available on Amazon EC2 via DevPay. New users simply click the Subscribe Now button, agree to the payment terms, and have access to the RHEL AMIs in a matter of minutes. The monthly fees includes the ability to run the RHEL AMIs on EC2, a Red Hat Network Update Entitlement and unlimited email support with 2-day turnaround.

 

Zmanda Internet Backup is a plugin for the Amanda Enterprise backup software. Amanda Enterprise is a certified, tested, and supported version of the popular Amanda open source backup and recovery tool. Amanda can now use Amazon S3 to backup, archive and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the Internet.

 

A number of other developers now integrating DevPay into their applications and I'll be blogging about them in the very near future. If you build a cool application with DevPay, send us some mail, leave a comment to this blog post, or write your own post with all of the relevant information.

-- Jeff;

Comments

[Jeffrey McManus]

This is going to be really useful for Approver.com -- since we started the site, users have asked us for ways to upload and store larger files. This may just give us a way to do that economically.

[Tom Gleeson]

Pity it's only for US developers. Are there any plans to extend DevPay to European Union based devs.?

Tom

[A. Logan Murray]

I'm still not clear on what the difference is from Amazon FPS. Is it specifically the ability to meter AWS usage? If so, why not simply build this into FPS?

From the FPS page:

"Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) is the first payments service designed from the ground up specifically for developers."

So what the heck is the need for DevPay?

[Abhishek]

Nice work you guys. Your efforts are really game changing in my mind.
I will have some detailed posts on my blog about this.

http://abhishek.tiwari.com/2007/12/19/another-day-another-amazon-web-service/

[Simon Wardley]

Very smart. A wonderful time saving and development cost reducing feature. Suppose I want to move to another service provider for my infrastructure - will you be open sourcing the tool or do I have to build a new payment system myself?

[Rajesh Akkineni]

It is really a Great Service. But we need a little more.
Insted of billing every month, we need options like billing after it reaches certain amount etc. Or after 6 months or 1 year. Why because $0.30 extra for every bill does not sound good when total bill amount will be just <2$ etc.

It would be nice to have DevPay support for more AWS services like SQS,SimpleDB etc. Then only a product can utilize AWS fully for Desktop Applications.

[Rajesh Akkineni]

We do feel like, there is total lack of interest towards developers outside US,EU.

[A.T.]

"no EU" rule again? sorry, we have no interest then. g'bye till you start to pickup main lesson - America is not center of universe. granted coming US recession, you'd rather learn quicker.

[Mordy]

I'm curious about the amazon.co.uk side of things too - is it likely to cross the ocean?

[Arthur Prichard]

Thank you!
After thirty years of software development, you are finally taking out the parts (billing, tracking) that I do not like :-)

[SnootyUsa]

Rajesh, what do you mean America is not the center of the universe? What universe do you live in? ;^0

[Jason]

This will work great for a new application I'm getting done.. will send you an email once its ready :D

[Zawad]

I think Companies like Amazone should also Consider Third word Contries

[Pieter Pepler]

I'm working from Africa, currently hosting in the USA: Mesothelioma-Junction.com

Starting a new project soon... Any time frame for servicing Africa?