Carolina Cloud pays SOFR on unused prepaid credits

badatnames

I've looked at doing this in Europe before, interest-bearing completely changes the classification of the prepayment. I didn't dig too deeply, but the general gist was that regulation-wise it really wasn't worth doing for a relatively gimmick-level feature

RNanoware

I wonder if they see any material differences in their customers’ usage or spending habits on the platform, receiving this interest? My perception of most businesses is that prepaid plans are typically disincentivized compared to subscriptions that auto-renew.

stego-tech

I think this is pretty great, though I’m sure hyperscalers will find a way to make sure such a scheme becomes as shitty for customers as frequent flier programs are today. Think of it from a small hobbyist perspective: I want to host a few small workloads, but I don’t want to deal with reoccurring billing. Maybe I have money now, but can’t guarantee it later. With this scheme, I frontload with a substantial amount of prepaid credits - say, $150 - while only using $5 or $10 a month. In theory , if the interest rate is correct, I could earn more on interest faster than the prepaid credits get drawn down - thus having a perpetual instance for a one-time charge. Personally? I think that’s a fair and reasonable arbitrage opportunity, because it also means the vendor can take that excess Capital and invest it themselves to create a return greater than the credits paid out. In practice, some greedy jerk C-Suite inevitably places caps on payouts or time limits on credits to ensure they capture more for themselves and leave less for their customers. I guess what I’m saying is that I dig the idea, I’d love to see it implemented by more vendors, but I also know it’ll get rules-lawyered to death in nanoseconds under the current market incentives.

effnorwood

Region North or South?

brightball

That’s pretty slick. These folks need to come to the Carolina Code Conference in a couple of weeks…

weakfish

Carolina wins a Stanley Cup, now we have hyperscalers? Moving up in the world!

teiferer

Mentioning what SOFR is would be incredibly useful. Gemini: The Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR) is a broad measure and benchmark interest rate for U.S. dollar-denominated loans and derivatives, reflecting the cost of borrowing cash overnight backed by Treasury securities.

manzt

Cool! Dumb question, but do prepaid credits ever expire? Feels like the interest only matters if they don't.

canucktrash669

They claim to be 1/3 the price of AWS, so I calculated for fun and it's 8x more expensive than my server auction machine I just got from Hetzner. Which itself is 6x cheaper than on-demand pricing at AWS, but only 3x cheaper than spot. Of course I get free egress. And my RAID1 perf can't be matched by the baseline EBS storage I've used in the comparison. In any case, they don't seem to really have an edge on AWS unless you have huge egress. What did I miss?