Would MUCH prefer to pay for the service!

[mysticturner]

I've posted what I'm about to say once before & never got an answer - What is the financial status? Who Knows? My point is that in this thread is the first time I've seen someone put out a $ figure (we're now running in the red). This info needs to be communicated to the user community. I sincerely believe that people are generous (except spammers who are born of pure evil - I wonder if in the new release of 'The Omen', Damien grows up to be a spammer?). If a need is known and quantified, people respond. My suggestion is that on the advanced page, we put a simple little indicator that shows the monthly financial status - Red if we're loosing money, green if we're OK & building toward purchasing the next bigger, more reliable server, yellow if we're just hanging in there. Users don't need to know that we've only got $50 in the kitty or whatever. Inform users of financial need and people will respond with donations.

[SysKoll]

This one is for Josh -- I just donate time and bits of code.

[tcgraham]

I have used SG for several years. I would dearly miss it if it ever stopped. Josh and crew are truly dedicated to the site.
Now someone brings up the subject of making it a fee based site with all kinds of ideas on formulas for determining a price. Hey Folks, lets forget this whole fee based discussion. The next thing I will hear is somone suggesting that an IPO would be a great idea and then hire a gung ho but inept CEO to run the whole show, etc, etc. There is always someone wanting to mess with a product, ala "the new Coca Cola". Lets leave a perfect product aone. If Josh ever feels a need for money to run the site, there will be plenty of us users who will step up and contribute. Until then lets just just enjoy the product the SG team has given us.

[Prognathous]

I'll gladly pay $10~$20 a year for a more reliable version of SG. Until then, it's as good a time as ever to donate, so I just did

Prog.

[SysKoll]

To clarify, the current sg sever runs out of Josh's pocket, with some ads to help pay for the hosting, and some donations from kind users. It will remain free.

What is proposed is creating a new, independent site, with new domains, that will offer a for-pay service similar to sg. It will have with commercial support, quality of service and a higher bandwidth. It will not replace sg, it will complement it. Neither Josh nor me will get a red penny from that new service, and I'd even volunteer some help to get it started.

[some_yahoo]

I checked the "no" option, but that said, I think I can say I would happily cough up a donation once in a while at random.

So just because I checked NO in no way means I think the service is "worthless".

In fact - with this recent outage, I am more convinced of it's value than ever.

What I would absolutely LOVE is for SG to keep a list of heavy spam sources and make it available as a blacklist, a la Spamcop so we can set our email servers to look in there and decide if the inbound email is crap or not.

[kerflot]

I checked the "no" option, but that said, I think I can say I would happily cough up a donation once in a while at random.

So just because I checked NO in no way means I think the service is "worthless".

Same here I've already decided to donate US$5 a year while I'm using it but I'd be prepared to go US$10 a year especially if reliability was guaranteed.

Recent outage was a worry for me as I had an address that was about to expire and wanted to increase the forwarding number.

[gourmet_333]

those who don't mind having their identity busted can of course donate.

paid services are never anon. that is the big problem.

[Zero]

I wouldn't pay for the service as subscription to it, but I would donate something (according to what I can afford) if it was required.

[gourmet_333]

I would donate something if it was required.

What is a "required donation" ? sounds oxymoronic to me.

[machineghost]

As a longtime user (and lover) of Spamgourmet, I would happily pay a few bucks a month for a premium account. I would not expect anything about that account to be different whatsoever ... except I would want a single feature: message preservation.

If I could actually look at (even in an awkward way, with a bad UI) say the last 50 or 100 emails deleted, instead of just the subjects of the last 3, that alone would feel worth the cost. After all, to make it happen you'll have to hold the text of my last 50 or 100 emails, and that takes more storage space. I can't imagine that the text of even 100 emails would cost even $0.05 extra a month ... but it would cost you more, and so as a user I would feel spending a few bucks a month to be completely justified.

Of course, as a lover of the service I should just donate money from time to time out of appreciation, but ... I'm human, and humans aren't big on paying for things they can get for free. A premium account would give us users a good reason to pay, and a feature like the one I described (perhaps along with some other popular "low hanging fruit" requests) wouldn't be *too* hard to make, hopefully.

Of course just having a payment system at all is work, but if you use a processor like Stripe they make it pretty easy, and essentially inside Spamgourmet you just need to connect to a single flag/bit on each user account (premium=true).