Cloud Services Pricing Models

Abstract

A major condition for commercial success is a well-defined pricing strategy, however, cloud service providers face many challenges around pricing. Clearness and transparency in pricing is beneficial for all the actors in the ecosystem, where the currently existing abundance of different pricing models makes decision making difficult for service providers, partners, customers and competitors. In this paper, the SBIFT pricing model is evaluated and updated to cloud context. As a result, a 7-dimensional cloud pricing framework is proposed that helps clarifying the possible pricing models in order to let companies differentiate themselves from competitors by price. The framework can be used also as a tool for price model development and communication about cloud pricing. The taxonomy is based on a broad literature review and empirical research on currently used pricing models of 54 cloud providers.