I've used DevPay. My experiences were generally positive. My problems with it were as follows.

1) Amazon doesn't expect one user to buy your service more than one time. Frankly, I didn't expect it either when I started the service or I would have structured it differently. I ended up having to give people free 2nd accounts when they asked for them, since I had no way to bill them for a 2nd account. User would sign up for my service (twitter related), like it, and decide they wanted their other twitter account to also use my service. So they would come back to my site, sign up again with their other twitter user name, I'd send them to Amazon to pay, and they'd get an error, since they had "already purchased that item".

2) Ending the service. When I decided to end the service, I went to try to cancel my devpay billing, so they would just stop billing all my users. This was an email procedure, not a form, which was weird. The email response I got was unsatisfactory to me.

     Per your request, we have denied your product. New customers will not be able 
     to sign up for your product any more. Please note, however, that your product 
     has customers who have signed up already. These customers will continue to get
     billed for their use of your product. If you don?t want your customers to use
     your application, please contact them and have them unsubscribe from your 
     application by going to http://www.amazon.com/dp-applications.

3) I had a general feeling that I was losing some customers due to them not having an Amazon account. I have no actual data to back that up.

All in all, it worked as advertised, but I think I won't use it again.

It is a shame that not even Amazon is challenging PayPal's monopoly in Europe. Neither Amazon DevPay nor Amazon Simple Pay is available in Europe, and Google Checkout is only available in the UK.

I'm confused as to why this is being posted, the service has been available since 2008.

Looks like your customers have to have an Amazon account before they can purchase. How would you sell such a concept to a company if they do not have an amazon account?

Perhaps I am reading it wrong...

""" Embed this link in your web site to allow your customers to purchase your product through Amazon. Customers can sign in with their Amazon.com credentials and select a credit card that is stored in their Amazon.com account. After your customers purchase your application, they are directed back to your web site. """

The main notion of DevPay is to act "on behalf of" a user, in order to outsource billing to Amazon while using the common AWS APIs. Once a user signs up to your service using DevPay you get a custom Access and Secret Key that's bound to this user and allows you to do all S3 actions while he's billed.

Unfortunately this hasn't been introduced for EC2 - they only allow Paid AMIs and no way to start these for your users without having their AWS credentials.

I guess I had missed this when they rolled it out. It definitely gives me some new ideas about leasing value-added EC2 instances to others.

If DevPay worked outside of the US I would be using it for my product today. Since it doesn't, I'm not. And that is probably not a bad thing because it has caused me to build my software in a much more generic way which means I'm not dependent on EC2 either - and in fact, I'm now saving money because EC2 is fairly expensive compared to the other options I now have, including running on some of my in house capacity where it makes sense.

Related post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315819

Has anyone used this?

What's the difference between DevPay and Paid AMIs?