Proposal: Update how Period and Renew Window are used.
PROGRAMMING TASK
Description of Task
The goal of this programming task is to update how the period and renew window are used to more like a billing and grace period.
Reason or Need for Change
Currently the allowance settings are quite complicated and do not translate well from current storage offerings. Today when users pay for storage they are used to seeing $X/Month for X TB. Our current period and renew window set up does not easily fit into this context.
Design / Proposal
The main idea is to have a billing period and a grace period (naming/terminology is up for debate). Let's look at this in the current context of having a 3 month allowance period.
With today's set up (3 month period, 1 month renew window), users would get charged for the initial contract formation, then again in 2 months for the contract renewal, then every 3 months.
If we change it to be a 1 month period and a 2 month renew window, we are still forming 3 month contracts but we create the ability to give the users 1 month billing cycles. The renew window now becomes this grace period where the decision for users is now more clearly a decision of how much of a safety net do they want for their contracts to renew. Users can increase or decrease their renew window (grace period) without impacting the frequency that they see charges for contract renewal.