I intend this to be a monthly subscription service for 2 reasons:
1. Reliability
I want to use the stories generated and hosted by Storyteller for FAQ, customer support, prototyping and storyboarding purposes, which would remain on a company's website for a long while, requiring a good level of reliability.
I'm hosting the images off Amazon S3 so huge traffic spikes for one member's image wouldn't affect other people's stuff.
2. No fuss
I made Storyteller to be a no-fuss and easy solution, so users wouldn't have to bother with FTP, HTML, Dreamweaver or a web interface, hence I intend this to be a pay as you go service, for minimal configuration fuss.
Unless of course the user explicitly deletes unwanted stories.
Since I'll be paying the bill for S3, and actively maintaining the service for good level of reliability, that's my plan for billing.
- Open sourcing
I'm not sure about open sourcing everything but I do intend to open source parts of the project, because I agree with 37signals that when you make something, you can't just make one thing :)
I would also consider the idea of having some kind of 'export' feature - export to an HTML file and a folder of images, upload to an FTP server, create HTML snippets, etc.
I know a lot of people that would use something like this for a knowledgebase app for their companies, but would run it on their corporate intranet and wouldn't want to have to go to the outside world to fetch data (or, for that matter, have screenshots of their internal applications floating around on the internet).
Perhaps this could be an enterprise version, an internally-hosted service, or some other pricing model (e.g. purchase a corporate license for a higher price, free upgrades for life).
Once a corporate user makes the purchase, that's a lump sum in your pocket, and since they're using their internal systems to manage everything (rather than using your S3 account), there's little further cost to you (other than support, which should be minimal).
What this gets you is larger one-time income (until the next paid upgrade), but lower costs. There would be no real change to your workflow, other than that you'd occasionally get big cheques from people you'd never hear from again.
Yeah, I'm aware that some companies prefer to have their content available only within their private networks but different big enterprises have pretty different requirements.
Right now, I want to focus my efforts to create a great product for folks like myself, who would enjoy and benefit from easy and no-fuss storytelling with screenshots.
I might consider an enterprise version down the road, but creating a great product to scratch my own itch and help others like me comes first.
