Geek In Disguise

Amongst the Silverlight news this week at Mix07 were some announcements around the Live API's. Brian Arbogast's session went in to this in some more detail and included a great demo from Match.com that made is very clear how API's like Messenger can create very compelling solutions.

Inside Microsoft captured the essence of the API announcements and here they are:

For basic usage, the API will always be free

Usage up to one million unique users is free, except for:

Windows Live Search is free up to 750,000 searches per months

Virtual Earth (Live Maps) is free up to 3 million map tiles per month

Silverlight video streaming is free up to 4 gig, with free unlimited streaming, and no limits on users

Above one million unique users, sites will have to pay 25 cents per user per year

For Search and Virtual Earth, sites will need to negotiate a commercial agreement with Microsoft

No beta services will charge for usage of the API. You will only have to pay after it leaves beta

Users will be averaged out per quarter, so if you have a big spike one month, you won’t have to pay for it

That's a pretty compelling set of offerings I think with the Virtual Earth and Silverlight ones being most interesting. dev.live.com is the place to go to find out more. Brian had a great slide I'm going to hunt down that showed our plans for making API's available and the aim to make as much of it free as possible.