US Patent 7379884 Power on demand tiered response time pricing

Methods, articles of manufacture, and systems for determining a fee to be charged for requests processed in a grid computing environment based. In one embodiment the fee may be determined based on the time it takes to process a request and/or pricing schedules that may vary depending on a variety of pricing criteria. In another embodiment, a completion time criterion that defines a maximum acceptable time to complete a request may be specified. If the amount of time needed to perform the request is less than the maximum acceptable time specified, returning the results may be delayed to avoid providing services valued in excess of what the customer has paid for.