Just Get RID of the CREDITS!!!!

[MicahWilliamson]

I am an Esri Business Partner. I have had conversations with every one of my clients about credit usage.

Every.

Single.

One. 

In a world of ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Portal, Level 1 Users, Level 2 Users, Server Roles, WebApp Builders, Concurrent licensing On/Off/On. THERE IS ALREADY ENOUGH CONFUSION. 

Please. Please. for my sanity.   Just get rid of the credits.

Either you have access to the tool or not. Go ahead and use the Freemimum model it's fine we're used to it. 

Own that it is the Worst Idea Ever and lets move past it. downwithcredits‌

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Please See my responses below for more clarification...

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[EricEagle]

Couldn't agree more.  I manage a full Esri stack professionally and barely understand the credit system. I do not see what problem it is intending to solve and consequently the hope is not for a replacement, but a removal of the system.

My home (personal) ArcGIS  account expired last year - because I had a small feature class or two sitting on it, it just sat there running into around -600 credits.  No warning, no email notification, nothing.  The whole system seems designed explicitly to obfuscate the true cost of doing business; even simply storing data that is entirely dormant will run you into negative credits.  Bad experience.

[AnnalieseVollick]

Amazingly put! Well thought out and described ideas and potential solutions to AGOL credits from both you and Micah Williamson.  I honestly do think that credits create another level or complexity and fear to the landscape of how we do our business with esri software. This gets my vote up!

[Paul_Christensen]

I am a brand new Technician for a Small Local Government and I was completely unaware credits were even a thing until recently. I am experimenting with ArcGIS  to use with Collector for our post disaster damage assessments that ESRI has several tutorials for and touts as one of the many uses for their software. I recently acquired administrative rights to our organizational account and realized my tiny feature classes (some from the tutorials) had cost me about 1 credit per day for several weeks. When I have a balance of only 200 credits, 14 credits is a big hit. I do no other geoprocessing or credit consuming functions to my knowledge. I say to my knowledge, because I haven't consumed any other credits besides  storage, but I also say that because an operation does not tell you if you are using credits or not! 

Now, I am afraid to continue my Collector experiments because I will soon need to justify the extra expense to my bosses, and I haven't even delivered something useful yet. My Emergency Ops Center also wants to look into utilizing ESRI products, such as Dashboards and Collector, and having to budget credits in there is just one more complication that I need to learn and justify for the product I am delivering to them.

ESRI already has licensing tiers, spatial analyst for example, so if I upgrade to that tier, and I pay a subscription to use those tools, why would I also pay a credit charge for every operation I perform? 

I agree with the freemium model. I will pay upfront to just "Own" the tool, and run it to my hearts content, than have to pay every time it is ran. What if I run it and I forgot to input a variable and need to run it again consuming even more credits? 

[ColeAndrews]

To go devils advocate here, do you want the little guy to be subsidizing the big guys? AGO is running in the cloud. The assumption is that as more users/organizations/processes start happening in AGO, Esri has to scale it accordingly. For the desktop license, esri's 'monetary responsibility' is the same whether your desktop hardware is geocoding 1 hour per month or 23 hours per day. Alternatively, if you're doing all of your processing in AGO, the esri cloud resources required are not equivalent in both scenarios. They would have to scale up as many organizations eat up the cloud resources ($$$). So if a large organization is running processes and mapping all day every day for many users, their cost would be the same or similar to the self employed consultant not using many cloud resources? I think the pay-to-play credit model is trying to account of those disparities. Otherwise, the little guy would likely end up paying too much and the big guy too little. 

[EricEagle]

Amazon does exactly what you're talking about and does it without credits.  Except for the class warfare bit it was a nice try, but credits are pretty indefensible.

[ColeAndrews]

AWS is not the same price for every organization. That is the point. You pay for what you use. Esri (AGO) does not pay AWS the same as what I pay them, because we are at different scales.

Credits may not be the right answer. But neither is across the board flat rate pricing.

Multiple commentors have suggested the exact same pricing no matter how much you use. They see it as either enabled or disabled. That model doesn't work:

• "If a user is not licensed for a task, product, analysis or action. PUT A LOCK ON IT" -- It's how much the task or analysis is run, and to what degree, that matters.
• "I will pay upfront to just "Own" the tool, and run it to my hearts content, than have to pay every time it is ran." -- Not sustainable. If Eric want's to geocode millions of records per day in AGO, he is using more resources and thus should pay more than John Doe who geocodes 20 blockbuster stores per year.

[EricEagle]

Sure, so you pay for cycles.  The original post is about credits, and how they mask the true cost of doing business.  They are in that sense misleading at best and deceptive at worst.  It has nothing to do with big-guy-little-guy, it has to do with Esri's somewhat perplexing resistance to straightforward currency transactions in cloud computing.

[JohnMDye]

I agree that a flat-cost model would be unsustainable for all the reasons that Cole Andrews‌ mentions and more. All I think anyone is asking for is to get rid of credits and just use straight up dollars and cents so that anyone can make sense of the cost of a particular transaction without having to do some (admittedly simple) math first.

[JohnMDye]

+1

[FarWestGEOConsultants]

John Dye‌ says "Credits are a cost abstraction, plain and simple. That is, they serve no purpose other than hiding the true cost of performing a workflow from an end user."

Perhaps it might be better to look at credits as a way of normalising the price structure for a world wide economy. Not everyone uses the US$ but they can pay for credits and use ArcGIS Online in their local currency.