PullMonkey Blog

VIN API – fair pricing model

It can't be a shock to any of you that after many months (wait - more like a full year) of running VIN API completely free and out-of-pocket, it is time to monetize. As I am sure most of you know, the back-end data is quite pricey. For example, a monthly subscription for a "lite" data set (your typical year, make, model, engine type, etc) at one of the better known distributors would run you about $260.00 a month for ~800 VIN decodings. This is some very expensive data at 32.5 cents a VIN. Some of you that use our API are running 50,000+ VINs through in a weekend, that is $16,000! Wow!

Ok, so what did we decide to do? Well first, and most importantly, we decided to keep the service up and running; for a while there it was looking pretty bleak and if you take a second to look at the numbers (financially) you can understand why. Anyway, to be as fair as possible, we did not feel this could be monetized as a subscription-based product, some months you need 500,000 VINs and some only a 1,000. Looking at the data for year, we had many questions - what plan would you pick? should the plan rollover it's unused decodings?

We discovered a lot of complexity in the subscription model, so we decided to setup the pay as you go plan, where you buy your decodings at various bulk levels. For instance, you could buy in groups of 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 such that you would realize savings on a price-per-VIN basis the larger the group you purchase. There is no use policy either, so you can sit on the VINs for as long as you want, or you can even buy decodings the day (even the minute) before you need them. No monthly credit card bill, no rollovers, just simple "buy what you need," and if you buy in bulk, you save.

Another consideration in doing this was having to maintain soft limits. For example, if the user purchases the 5,000 VINs per month plan, and the their site does well this month and they need 6000 VINs, should they have chosen the 10,000 VIN plan? We didn't think so, we figured no hard limit, just soft limits, and after the soft limit is hit, we would charge the additional VINs at the current rate per VIN to the user's next month's bill. We tried to explain this to a few current users that are helping us come up with reasonable rates and they were not all that thrilled about it. So we had a problem, we did not want users to pay for what they did not need, but at the same time we did not want to cut users off in the middle of a month when they hit their limit. That entire idea had to be scrapped and along with it went the idea behind the subscription plan itself. We like it though, it's simple now - buy your decodings and use your decodings, we will email you if you are getting low and may want to add decodings to your account.

Subscription models are great for static resources and static services, but not a single one of our customers decodes the same number of VINs each month, so it just won't work. So onward and upward, pay as you go and regardless of how the other API providers offer their service, we are excited to be a little different and lot cheaper as you will soon find out.

Enjoy!

VIN API – PHP and XML Parsing

Thanks go to Michael for sharing his hard work with the rest of you VIN API and PHP developers 🙂
I hope this helps -

VIN API Examples for PHP and VB .NET

A few of our VIN API customers have been kind enough to take our Ruby and curl examples and come up with .NET and PHP implementations.
Here is a VB .NET example:

And for PHP, you have this:

Hope this helps and if you have examples for other programming languages, please let us know.

Vin API – Phase II

We've just finished adding A LOT more details to VIN API's result set. This time we've added things like MPG, MSRP, cargo room/volumn, etc. See the full list below, it is very comprehensive.

If you use ruby (look for a future post with .NET and PHP examples), and want the complete dataset, you would setup your ActiveResource like this:

And then call our API like this:

The only change (for those of you who have already implemented phase I) is to send in a "complete" parameter with value of "true" ... upon doing so, VIN API will send you the complete dataset versus the basic (and default) dataset.

The results would look like this (in XML) and be prepared because it is lengthy:

That's it, just thought I'd share VIN API's Phase II.

USB drive disconnecting and reconnecting randomly

It was very strange, I got a new 2 TB external USB drive for Christmas and I noticed a number of windows (nautilus windows) opening up throughout the night.  So I would wake up to find 20 - 30 windows opened to the media mount directory (/media).  Overtime and watching the logs, I noticed that the new USB drive was disconnecting itself and then reconnecting.  As it would reconnect and mount, the new mount point /media/<some long character string> would pop open in a  nautilus window.  When the drive would eventually disconnect, the opened nautilus window would no longer have access to the data and would display contents from one directory up (/media).  After a couple days I finally found the answer and tried it and it worked as advertised.

For those having the same problem, this is where I found the solution you see below.

$ sudo sdparm --clear STANDBY -6 /dev/sdb
# note that your device could be something else, for example - /dev/sd<something>

And if you get an error, something like this:

change_mode_page: failed fetching page: Power condition

Then you should be able to use hdparm instead, like this:

sudo hdparm -S 0 /dev/sdb