How precious are your Kitely minutes ?

[Constance Peregrine]

I'm also on the gold plan. More for the amount of land it gives me (love my advanced mega) than time. My problem isn't Kitely minutes lately, it's RL time. Anyone know where I can buy some RL minutes, so I can spend some time on Kitely?

I would sell ya some of mine but I have precious few left-)))) [and I may find some use for them also, some fine day]

[Ruby O'Degee]

I spend my precious minutes building in my worlds. With 28 regions to write about, there is very little down time. When there is down time I read about building, watch tutorials and read fiction that inspires my builds.

During the summer I build more and during the winter there is less time to build. The Fall of the year is usually consumed with RL work (education), so the last week of summer freedom is devoted to building in a frenzy. It is a good thing that I believe in "revision" - writing, building and life, or I would feel more constrained than I do. Unlike some of my neighbors I'm never bored, and i never face a blank page.

After a decade of Myst/Uru, shards and open sims, I am cautious about where I build. Nearly every universe has ups and downs, starts and fits.

I started out at Kitely with the free plan, followed by the Bronze plan and then leaped in with the Gold plan. I never used up my bronze plan minutes during the winter months, but the Gold plan is best for me during the summer months when I wanted to "stretch my canvas." I've been using the Gold plan for several months. I am content not to watch the clock tick or worry about space. My only issue now is whether to keep my storage regions? I can close them down or set them up anytime. Kitely is by far the most flexible server service for builders anywhere. Even my own desktop builds require more attention than my storage regions do, on or off.

Of course my family and friends think I am nuts, and that I need a storybulder addict's plan that limits my minutes spent building. But then they also know I will build with paper models -- if I am not allowed to flex my blue print, graphic loving, quilt pattern, needlework, clay potting fingers _ all blame can be directed @ my parents and grandmother for that. Born into it.

While I am building at Kitely, in between the uploads, backups and mapping, I look for forum topics that pertain to me. I post when I feel its important to post about this or that technical or community issue. Posting can be a time consuming pursuit; however, and I would rather use that time to visit other builds and try out what scripts can be used in open sim.

I am looking forward to seeing kitely develop online shopping and the plaza (even if its requires a "do-over.") I plan to furnish my shop in the plaza and sell some items there and online. Although I built a storybuilding school on my own region, and If there is a need I plan to teach/tutor a course in GIMP clothing and texture making. One hour every two weeks away from precious building would do me good so argue the family shrinks :0 I do believe community is an important element for immersion, but it best comes about naturally, and when interests are shared.

Oh, and I do plan to finish those 28 regions, by hook, crook or distraction. At least that is the plan.

[Sierra Jakob]

I try to spend most of my time in world building in my own private world. Of course, Dundridge is usually calling me over to his own private workspace world to see his latest invention. I tend to not go roaming a whole lot. Usually one has to fly to explore worlds with any efficiency--and I tend to start feeling a little nauseated after a few minutes of flying in unknown territory. Therefore, I usually wait for Dundridge to go exploring, and bless his heart, he usually lets me know when he has found a really good world--so I'm lucky to have a personal "screener"! lol. (Thank you, Dundridge.)

All that being said I LOVE to attend musical events in world--if we are talking live musicians. And ESPECIALLY if there are really good dance balls available. It would be awesome if there was a really easy way to be notified about group events without having to search the forums. I get so busy building, I forget to look for those things. And I also tend to completely forget todays date and easily miss things--a personal flaw I know, but there you go.

As to minutes, I'm on the Silver Plan and that seems to be just about right for now. At the end of July, it was a little scary to get down to about 100 minutes left. But so far, I haven't had to buy any extra minutes since getting on the Silver Plan several months ago.

[Ada Radius]

I'm having fun with the gold plan, though I may need to scale it down to cut my expenses at some point, and because I haven't had time to do much in VR at all lately. Being able to put up and take down worlds as needed with OARs is the game changer for me lately. Though that's because I now take server side excellence for granted

[Constance Peregrine]

I'm having fun with the gold plan, though I may need to scale it down to cut my expenses at some point, and because I haven't had time to do much in VR at all lately. Being able to put up and take down worlds as needed with OARs is the game changer for me lately. Though that's because I now take server side excellence for granted

Yea, that is so fun for me also Ada....creating oars, saving them, and then loading others....I still like watching them load from adjacent regions.

I just wish more people in the Metaverse would see the value in this.

[Ada Radius]

Yah, it takes a while just to explain how it works. It took me a while to "get it" after I had all those sims to play with, but was still stashing too much stuff in inventory.

One other incredibly cool thing about it is that, for things like the monthly board meeting for our nonprofit, I can make a simple attractive meeting sim (I like beach chairs near water, meself , save the OAR, and either leave the sim up if I don't need it for something else, or take it down and put it back up when it's needed, for about 3 cents, plus avatar time of, at the most, US$2 for everyone to be there for an hour or two (usually less as most will use their own KC) and less than ten minutes of my time to set it up. That's the cheapest secure teleconferencing out there. We've found that even metaverse newbies can figure out who's talking by the little green bars, which makes it easier to keep everyone sorted than the highly insecure GTalk or Skype. Because Kitely doesn't have server side lag, Kitely's Talk sound quality is the best in the metaverse, as far as I can tell.
Ada

[Constance Peregrine]

yea, it is teaching them that is the key, for sure...and some will still not "get it" as they simply can't wrap their minds around it at all.

I blame some of the commercial grids, in some regards, for this...they have a vested for-profit self-interest in maintaining a cloud over people's eyes...it annoys the heck outta me when I run into someone and they tell me some of the nonsense they have been led to believe about opensim...so darn annoying!!

If I had more energy I would go on a crusade!!! lol

[Danko Whitfield]

I had been on the Bronze plan since November which gives me 30 hours a month. Most months I hardly ever spent any time inworld here so I'd always be saying, "I could downgrade to the Free plan if I wanted to." The Bronze plan was cheap enough so I just never bothered. Until I started writing this post. LOL. Just downgraded.

I host a 4-region sim for a project I'm involved with. I was hosting it for 7 dollars a month under the Bronze plan but now it'll be 3 dollars a month under the Free plan. It is free to visit. People who don't use Kitely or are new always seem to worry about the cost of visitors. I get visitors to my world regularly and it has yet to add up to a dollar in any month.

The other thing people seem to worry about is having to pay for extra minutes for themselves. It only costs a dollar for 5 hours and you don't pay that whole dollar upfront. It's 1 KC per minute. So an extra half hour will cost you a whole dime.

Once in a while I put an extra world up when I have time to work on it and don't feel like doing it in SoaS for some reason, usually having to do with ease of inventory. If I leave it up for a whole month it costs me another dollar. I have active accounts in 26 worlds but only have prims in SL and Kitely (although I'm about to add prims to a free spot on End of the Metaverse grid). I'm considering putting prims on one other grid if I can find free space. Whenever I mention this to friends, they always are trying to get me to buy/rent land on their favorite grid. A lot of prices have come down on other grids but I always say to them: I'm just looking for a free spot, if I have to spend money, it will be on Kitely because nobody can beat their prices.

I think Kitely is not only cheaper than Non-Kitely users realize, I think it is cheaper than most Kitely users realize. At one point I had 20 regions for 23 dollars a month. Who can beat that?

Sometimes I think Kitely is cheaper than Kitely management realizes. Shhhh!

Of course, it's all according to your individual needs.

[Constance Peregrine]

shhhhhhh!!

btw, I need all the dimes I can get!!!

[Constance Peregrine]

Hi Danko,

We fully realize how inexpensive our service is it is one of the competitive advantages that we aimed for when we designed our unique on-demand architecture.

Unfortunately, some people don't understand how much money they can save with our offering and prefer to pay other OpenSim hosting providers more based on misconceptions of how our pricing works.

Most people who view our offering also don't realize that their Kitely world can automatically get a dedicated multi-core server with 8GB of memory to run on when it needs that amount of resources. They compare our offering with those of OpenSim-based service providers that cram many regions on the same server and think that the money they save by choosing us isn't worth the extra stress they feel about using our time-based pricing model. They end up paying more and getting less than what they can get with Kitely.

Kitely worlds can get access to more server resources than the "ultimate/platinum/enterprise" hosting packages other service providers often charge more than $80/month for. Kitely worlds also have the advantage of using our proprietary Advanced Megaregions, cloud-based inventory system and cloud-based asset system which further improve our price/performance compared to that of other OpenSim hosting options.

In regards to payment flexibility, we believe you shouldn't be forced to pay for things when you aren't using them. That said, if you like our vision then upgrading your Kitely plan to one that offers more than you actually need is a good way to help us fund Kitely's continued development.