Several people have been asking us of late how we intend to charge for the Experience API/LRS component of SCORM Cloud. To be candid, we haven’t entirely figured out how we should charge for the standalone LRS capability found in SCORM Cloud. So, our thinking is this:
We’re going to wait a little while to figure that out, and during that time, externally-generated xAPI statements will remain free. For example, statements that originate from our xAPI bookmarklet will be stored at no cost.
At this point, we commit to keep externally generated xAPI statements free of charge until the formal release of xAPI from ADL (currently rumored for the end of Q1 2013).
One key distinction is that if you use SCORM Cloud to import a xAPI package and then assign that course to a user via SCORM Cloud or one of its plugins, you will consume a registration, and registrations cost money. For pricing purposes, we treat xAPI packages just like SCORM packages.
Our best guess is that as we move beyond the formal release of xAPI next year, we will probably base our pricing around the number of users for whom you report statements on. We want you to collect a huge pile of statements this year. We want you to collect a huge pile of statements going into the future. More xAPI statements will make xAPI more effective, and it will allow us to better support our users. We will find a reasonable way to relate the utility of those statements to your costs. At this point, though, we still feel it’s too early to specify that pricing.
