aragon / aragon-court

🧿 A subjective oracle secured by cryptoeconomics
https://aragon.org/court
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Value-based pricing vs flat-rate pricing #259

Open john-light opened 4 years ago

john-light commented 4 years ago

Currently, Aragon Court uses a flat-rate pricing model to charge subscription fees. Here the cost to secure all of the value protected by Aragon Court is spread evenly across all subscribers at a flat-rate.

A better model might be a value-based pricing model, where subscribers are charged not based on a pre-determined flat-rate, but based on the value to the organization in keeping their organization secure and protected by the court. This makes it so that organizations pay a subscription fee relative in cost to the value they are receiving from Aragon Court.

Under a value-based model, a subscriber would approach Aragon Court and negotiate a subscription fee with the court based on the value of the court's protection. Subscribers that derive more value from the court pay more. Subscribers that derive less value pay less. A simple method to use to measure "value derived" would be to look at the value held in the organization's vault and any contracts owned by the organization's Agent.

There are a few ways this model could be implemented. The first that comes to mind is that a new role is defined in Aragon Court: the Subscription Manager. The address that is given the Subscription Manager role is set by the Aragon Court Governor. The Subscription Manager is able to add new addresses to a Subscriber List and also to set the Subscription Fee that each subscriber must pay. The Subscription Fee is set individually per subscriber. The Subscription Manager will act as a "sales person" or "sales team" that is responsible for sourcing and qualifying leads, negotiating deals with potential subscribers, and upon closing a deal adding the new subscriber to the Subscriber List. If the Subscription Manager consistently fails or is slow to perform their duties then they can be replaced by the Aragon Court Governor.

A variation of this model could be to have a two-tier pricing system: one with flat-rate pricing, and one that uses value-based (variable) pricing. Under this two-tier model, everyone can subscribe for free during a "trial" period. During the trial period, the Subscription Manager will analyze new subscribers and see if any would be good candidates for value-based pricing. The Subscription Manager could develop criteria for which subscribers stay on flat-rate pricing after the trial period is over and which have to switch to value-based pricing (this way expectations are clear when people become a subscriber). Everyone who isn't switched to value-based pricing by the end of the trial period will automatically turn into flat-rate subscribers. The Subscription Manager has the ability to change someone on the flat-rate pricing plan to a value-based pricing plan at any time (for example, if the organization grows from a few thousand DAI secured to 1 million DAI secured, or if they are unable to negotiate a value-based price until after the flat rate pricing has kicked in).

Screenshot_2020-03-18 Aragon Court pricing - Google Drawings