Pricing for Spamhaus is different for antispam providers than for end users and is actually more expensive.

As to the Postini pricing, at $3 per year if you total up the price of a ServerProtect account at $29.95 per month for a year and divide it by 3, you’re only able to get 120 email accounts for the same price, which for most people using our ServerProtect service would come nowhere close to the number they need.

And we’re not charging any more. We haven’t said we’re going to increase our service pricing per month. In fact, we added more mesages to the base allotment per month. What we’re talking about is charging people for overages above the base allotment of messages.

I mean no disrespect, but you may need to rethink your business model if you can’t charge them $1 more per client. You can’t include everything free if you have no revenue.. it all has to be covered somewhere.

Spamhause only charge: Cost per email user PER YEAR: US$ 0.02 (based on UNLIMITED users) - SEE http://www.spamhaus.org/datafeed/pricecalculator.lasso.

Postini (now owned by Google) only charges $3 per email user for 1 years worth of unlimited protection (SEE http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/security/compare.html).

How many email address do you guys host? Does Google (Postini) work out cheaper for you?

I would like to hear what other easyantispam clients think about this?

How does easyantispam think they can charge so much more for 2 cents PER YEAR increase in their costs (per email user)?

I understand your point. We charge $20/month to $30/month–even for the 2 users. So the economics are different for us.

I checked many antispam providers; I have NOT been able to find anything less expensive. In fact, many providers charge per mailbox at a rate of $1/month/mailbox. For me that would cost $500/month for my 500 users (40 domains).

I don’t think you should absorb the increase. Rather I would ask your clients to pay an extra $5/month for improved spam filtering. If they don’t, just remove them from EAS. At that point, they will notice a significant increase in spam and perhaps would reconsider.

Remember, EAS indicated to us that SpamHaus is no longer a free service for them. As such, it costs more to provide this service. Like the price of gas, we at times have no choice but to accept it and pass on increased costs to our customers. Our travel costs and hourly rate has gone up as a result of general price increases. If you go to the Supermarket, you will notice the price of bread and other staple products have increased considerably. Recently, the price of one of my favorite breads went up 20 cents the one week and increased again 50 cents the next. It now costs 70 cents more than before. Some of this is due to gas prices and some due to price of grains.

Even if I choose to not purchase this bread, my next choice of bread has also gone up in price for the same reasons.

Again, I understand your point. We do a lot of work for non-profits. I have volunteered for over 22 years on a couple of non-profit boards. I always charge my non-profit clients 30 percent less per hour than my regular for-profit clients. However, I had to increase the prices across the board–both non-profits and for-profits received price increase. And yes, some left us. That is understandable. Most of them have stayed.

Best regards.

Krume

I think this is an excessive increase. EAS is a great service and I thought it was priced fairly. I would pay more than I was, but not 3X more!

It seems to me like there should be a separate pricing rate for RBL spam. For example, you pay some lower price rate per RBL message.

The other thing I worry about is the fact that someone (my competition) could blast mail at me from a blacklisted IP and I would be charged for it all - probably not likely, but possible.

I know, there’s quality and conveniences with EAS, and I fully appreciate that time saved. My point is that we’ve, for the past 6 months, used a system at a given rate per month, and now we’re being told that our costs for some servers will go up 600-800% … that’s a hard nut to swallow now that we’ve successfully setup hundreds of customers on the system. We currently have 27 servers running with EAS - not a small chunk of change when it’s all averaged out. I can’t go to them at this point and say “Look, it works great, we can’t run this other product because of server loads/management time, etc - but now you’ve got to pay us more” … customers will walk away, even some that have been with us 5-8 YEARS and have had no other issues. I can’t blame them. $30 per server (remember, I have 27), the cost of EAS, I can absorb - $135 or more, I can’t - unless I want to oversell my product/services - and I flat our refuse to do that. I haven’t oversold in 9 years, I’m not starting now.

The odd thing is that I’ve expressed my concerns to the EAS team via email, and have not had a response as of yet. Until I do, I have no other choice but to search for a worthy replacement for EAS.

I don’t work for EAS. However, I know how much time this will save me. Fighting spam has been a major pain.

If I understand the math, if you charged an extra $1/month for the service, it appears to me that you would recoup your increase. Am I missing something here?

While I also provide it “free” to our clients, I have to factor in my time to provide the service. I charge the same fee per month to my clients whether they have 2 or 40 users (actually I charge a little bit more for the larger clients). In addition, for me I will be able to “turn off” my current spam filter server, which is a pain to manage–again saving me time. At my current rate, I will make up that extra cost if I can generate one extra billable hour per month. Even if I can’t, I will be saving several hours a month by NOT needing to manage one server. That may free up 10 hours or more. I am NOT kidding about this. There are many hours wasted trying to track down email delivery problems–many times without success (poor reporting). Not to mention having to update, backup, and maintain the current spam filter server.

My wife and kids might be happy about that. Perhaps not. But at least I may be able to get to bed earlier as it is now 1:31am EDT as I write this.