A story of how the author of S3stat benefitted from recent UI changes in the AWS management console.

But I’m a nerd. One of those lazy ones who likes to automate things, and even though this only took a few minutes out of my day, I’d much prefer to keep those minutes for things like blowing off work for the day to go rock climbing because it’s sunny and I can do that because I run my own company. The less time I have to spend dealing with these customers, the better. So I built a little sniffer that would detect pre-existing logfiles and gave the users an option of hitting the “go” button on the report runner themselves.

But I’m also a capitalist. So I didn’t push that out just yet.

Instead, I changed it to automatically run just one month worth of logs, so that new users could get a nice big taste of what they could expect from the service. Then I offered the option to purchase additional months of service so that they could process any older logs. And I priced those additional months of service at 100% the cost of normal S3stat service. All you’re doing is moving back the start date for your subscription.