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Comment by philbarr | Hacker News Reader

I have some questions:

- It says, "During the BETA period, all Watson Services will be available for free on Bluemix." So what are the prices after the beta period? I can't put the time into learning this if it's not viable after the beta.

- What is Bluemix? Is it just the "place where all the services are?"

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1. Right now we are working on a revenue sharing basis with the start ups that sign up as ecosystem partners (they also have access to more capabilities). http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/07/ibm-sees-salvation-in-watso... has a few examples of these start ups and you can sign up here: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/ecosystem.h.... We will likely come up with a pay-per-call model that's compelling for start ups as well.

2. BlueMix is the IBM PaaS - it has a lot of powerful services beyond Watson - http://bluemix.net. It allows you to create and deploy apps in the cloud.

This makes it sound like you are really only thinking about specific partners at the moment then? So it's not yet for the masses?

Like - I'm not really going to be using this in my next Android / IPhone app any time soon.

Presently IBM's just getting in the space. I was offered a chance to use BlueMix during the closed beta. I didn't for the same reason you mentioned: they didn't have a pricing plan. I too thought, "What's the point of building something if it will be really expensive later?" Fortunately, IBM seems to be reasonable when they came out with pricing.

I wouldn't build my company around the beta of Watson, but if you experiment during beta, you could have first mover advantage when the pricing comes out and you find it acceptable.

Our plan is definitely to allow you to use this on your Android/IPhone app once we are GA.

While it's not something that you'll have running completely on your mobile device, it's something that you can easily run on the backend server. Fortunately, BlueMix provides lots of very useful services for mobile devices, including automatic crash monitoring, user feedback, and cross platform push services. Feel free to find me on twitter (same name) and I can provide more details.

I dont think they were intending for this to go out on production applications just yet. You could just play around with the API in some personal or open source project for now. Whatever pricing plan they come out with should be reasonable.

Bluemix is IBM's implementation of CloudFoundry, an open-source Heroku-like platform-as-a-service. Presumably they're making this API available as an add-on to Bluemix applications.

That's correct. These APIs are some of the many services you can attach to your applications within BlueMix.

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