30. 120. 0. 30. 15.

Those are the big numbers Skype Prime sellers need to know.

30% is Skype's cut of what you earn. 30% is the kind of rate they've been able to get from Voxeo, where people call a phone number and talk to a psychic for 10 minutes at $7.00 a minute. When you make your living by consulting and offering professional services, 30% is a huge amount to pay for credit card processing and telephone service.

120 days is how long Skype will hold your money before paying you. They don't know how much money they'll need to refund due to fraud, user error, software glitches, etc. So this is their contingency fund. They are mostly managing two risks. Credit card fraud (not getting paid by buyers) and refund risk (having to give money back to buyers).

Buyers are paying for service with pre-paid, pre-cleared Skype credits. Unlike companies that process credit cards, Skype already has the buyer's cash in hand. So there is no risk of credit card fraud.

That leaves refunds. What percent of transactions will be refunded? How much money does that represent? What can be done to avoid those situations? What can be done to keep those costs down? Skype doesn't know. They hope to get hard figures and adjust both the duration and percent of the payout to better match real world losses and adjustments. But it will take time. At least 120 days.

By the way, could you wait 4 months for your paychecks to resume?

0.00% interest is what Skype pays you while they bank your money.

"Skype to Skype minutes in Q4 2006 alone totaled 7.6 billion minutes" - Skype PR

30 dollars per hour is the minimum bill rate. This cuts out tens of millions of Skypers from developing nations.

"Six people download Skype every second" - Skype PR

$15 million revenue from Skype Prime. Just a back of the envelope calculation. Skype is running at 30 billion Skype-to-Skype minutes a year; more with growth. Let's guess one tenth of a percent of those minutes go through Prime. The minimum charge is $0.50 per minute. That's the minimum.