The Collaborative Methods blog has seen an update in which Varun Parmar, the AFCS Product Manager, is asking for feedback on the proposed pricing models for AFCS (aka Cocomo). For those not in the know, AFCS stands for Adobe Flash Collaboration Service, a hosted service that provides real-time capabilities to Flex and AIR based applications. It runs on the Adobe Connect backend and provides a similar feature set to Adobe's own product (similar, yes, not identical but let's not go into that now ;-)

The proposed pricing models are, as you can imagine, fairly complex since they aim to support a variety of different usage models as well as data intensive or messaging intensive applications. The proposed models will include par per use pricing as well as a zero upfront costs, both of which are plus points in my book. What remains to be seen is how the running costs of AFCS compare to something like FMS, especially for smaller apps that do not require the infinite scalability of a cloud based service.

I cannot remember a time in which Adobe would ask its customers for feedback on proposed pricing *before* the product was fully released and I would therefore urge everyone to voice their opinions on the proposed pricing models now. Note that actual figures on price points have not yet been made public, but as Varun outlines this will happen in the not too distant future.