Pay Per Use Bioinformatics Software

Equinox, a company based in London and started by the Imperial College, has started offering access to some of its bioinformatics tools on a pay per use basis. Basically, they host the software on their servers, and you pay them each time you want to run a query. Their flagship product has to do with protein structure prediction:

The first product available will be Equinox's leading Phyre(TM) homology modelling and fold-recognition software. User research has shown that proteomics is an ideal target market with positive feedback from research, biotech and pharma audiences.

Yadda, yadda, the press release goes on to state how great this all is. Of course my knee-jerk reaction was: "Pay? Nevah!" But then I realised that you'd have to pay anyway. Previously, this product had only been available via a software licence. Now, that's fine for big companies and universities, who use it frequently. I suspect most of them will stick with the licence as well.

But for smaller companies, or an isolated researcher who may only need to use the software once in his career, the Pay Per Use model may actually have an advantage. Of course, it would be preferable if they'd offer the tool for free, but what kind of business model is that?

Unfortunately, I couldn't find out what the actual price per use was, or how it compared to the cost of a licence. How many uses before a licence would be cheaper? They need to get the balance right, otherwise people will opt for licences every time, and the PPU idea might well die a premature death, as far as bioinformatics is concerned.

Meanwhile, if you want to play around with a bare-bones version of Phyre, you can still go here. Just put on your academic hat first.