Time for Paid/Premium service?

General discussion re sg.

Time for Paid/Premium service?

Postby misha20 » Tue Jan 21, 2020 12:59 pm

Yesterday's 24 hours outage was a wake up call for many of us on how critical SG has become. I have been with SG for over 10 years and used SG email accounts on more than a 200 websites. I took for granted that SG had nearly 100% uptime and, like most of us, I want to keep it that way. Sure, I donated to SG from time to time, but I don't think donations is a viable way to keep the service running. And I don't fancy an idea of switching to another disposable email provider and spending days changing my contact emails on multiple websites. I think it's time to add a premium/paid option to SG. For example, premium accounts can run on a separate server with 99.99% uptime guarantee and we can access support when issues arise (hopefully not). I understand that only some SG users have critical accounts linked to SG and will be willing to pay, but I am certainly one of these. This business model seems to work for some SG competitors, for example TrashMail is charging $22/year for Plus account...
What do you think about this idea?
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Re: Time for Paid/Premium service?

Postby josiah » Wed Jan 29, 2020 7:08 am

The outage was caused by a software verification lapse on my part.

paid/premium service was a discussion I had back and forth with my dad. He's practiced law for his career so I would historically defer to his judgment about why this has not already been in place. I don't have any experience running a business in the sense of taking money in exchange for some level of guarantee of service to customers, and it's not presently on the roadmap.

The financing of the service as-is hasn't been much more than donations cover, but I have in mind some effort to make the service more robust to hardware faults, etc. The operating cost will go up as a result. That may be the time to consider what you're suggesting. Additionally I've been writing out ways to verify routine changes to the codebase (which honestly should be datatable updates rather than perl vector updates, but that is where we're at for the moment)

I cannot make any promises, but if it comes to it, I will consider what you're suggesting, with the understanding that the liability of these sorts of impacts will too.
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Re: Time for Paid/Premium service?

Postby anon090526 » Sat Feb 08, 2020 5:50 pm

I have an in-between suggestion for your consideration - donation subscriptions.
From reading all the comments, it seems that there are quite a number of people who are willing to contribute to SG. I'm one of them. A potential issue is that donations are irregular and thought of only when the SG service is threatened, such as lately.

As an imperfect model of what I'm suggesting, there's a recreation-activity-related online community I participate in. Participation is free. But there's a "supporter" badge that you can buy for $40 a year set up as a Paypal annual subscription. End of January every year I get a Paypal charge. I can always cancel it on Paypal.

Now there are some meaningful benefits that this buys - the badge is visible and has some intangible value in a discussion forum. And you can elect to block ads, not applicable to SG. My motivation is that, plus the knowledge that I'm a patron supporting something I value just because I can afford to.

But the idea of asking for a donation subscription seems applicable. You can decide whether it's worth your trouble to provide badging, Except for this lightly-used forum, I don't know who would see it, but it might provide some motivation. Not really the focus of what I'm proposing. People are willing to pay a bit for this service. Offering it as a Paypal subscription for some amount that you think would work to cover costs likely makes participation in donations a bit more predictable.

https://www.paypal.com/us/smarthelp/art ... toComplete
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Re: Time for Paid/Premium service?

Postby axax » Mon Feb 10, 2020 6:53 am

Hi. I think you might find many who would give via donation subscription.
To keep donations appropriate, how about a model like this? <suggested.donation> = <amount.needed> / <current.donators>
I would also be happy to donate Basic Attention Token that I've earned using the Brave Browser. (Not too many sites are signed up yet and they're just sitting there in my wallet).

Thank you for your hard work!
Spamgourmet really matters!
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Re: Time for Paid/Premium service?

Postby sopan123 » Tue Mar 10, 2020 3:19 pm

wouldn't too much of your dad's legal advice regarding liability. he's likely being a good dad, not a lawyer. any good one can sell ski's to arabs in the summer.

the police don't even need to protect you, not Legally required to , it should be a 1hr write up...:)

any number of qualified Sgourmet users should be able to help.

i have resources, time,and great desire to help. I'm so very thankful for the work your dad offered to us with so much generosity.
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Re: Time for Paid/Premium service?

Postby xmoddz » Sun Dec 20, 2020 10:14 pm

I too would be interested in a premium tier option with other features

A way to actually block aliases so no log, they would just be blocked from working
A way to use a custom domain

I am currently looking at simple login and 33mail due to this, while SG is great and has been i find myself interested in more features

Also some websites dont accept SG emails when registering, but if i try a temp email service that gives you an email for about 30 mins, it accepts those, so getting SG to be accepted by all sites would be great

I am a pretty frugal person and tend to just go for free options but spam is really annoying and i would pay to battle with it lol
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Re: Time for Paid/Premium service?

Postby jj05 » Thu Feb 04, 2021 11:16 pm

I'm grateful for the service, and I've been happily using it for years, and I don't mind paying for service and support.

I recently tried donating in hope of giving more attention to the 421 error with Mailgun (see support forums), but that hasn't helped either.

Some of the issues in the support forums have been left unanswered, sometimes for years.

I would have loved to have a paid service that comes with support. But unfortunately, after losing some important emails, I've lost trust in the service.

I've started the painful process of moving away all my emails, so might be too late for me, but might still be useful for other people.
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Re: Time for Paid/Premium service?

Postby pogue972 » Wed Feb 10, 2021 1:08 pm

Maybe you could do something like Patreon where you have monthly subscribers and you have levels you can donate at to get certain benefits. Like, if a person donates a dollar a month they just get standard service. But, if they donate $10 a month they get access to more domains that are secret/private and won't trigger block lists. It basically does all the work for you and you just add the people who pay to an upgrade list or whatever.

https://www.patreon.com/

Alternately, there is a decentralized type of Patreon where you can't be kicked off (which is a problem with Patreon and some YouTube personalities who use it) and it uses exclusively cryptocurrency. It's called BitPatron and I don't know how reliable or simple it is to setup, but you can read more about it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18888092
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/bitpatron-3
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