ElmerEmail Pricing

The Elephant in the Room

Let me be honest and real for a moment. I would love to make ElmerEmail a free service. I come from a background of Open Source Software, Ham Radio, and Sailing, all where the cultures are ones of free exchange of information and helping each other learn and grow.

The problem is that not everything is free. ElmerEmail relies on high quality APIs to get it's information, along with servers and bandwidth to get that information to you, and all of this has costs associated with it. Even email itself, which while free to most end users, has costs associated with it when trying to do it at scale.

Years ago an early Internet and Technology pioneer Tim O’Reilly once said, and I'm paraphrasing: "If a service is free, you are not the customer, you are the product." These words have always stayed with me.

Services cost money to run and operate, and the way companies pay for those costs is ether by selling it to the customer directly, or turning service into a vehicle for advertising, charging marketing firms for the opportunity to spam the services users with ads.

I created ElmerEmail because I had a need for a service like this. Being out in the ocean or way back in the mountains of Tennessee, there were/are times when my only way to communicate with the outside world is an HT or satellite messaging device. I can send an email, but I'm having to hope that someone on the other end is checking their Inbox, and that's not a good feeling when you are anxiously watching a storm front moving in.

This was, and still is, a labor of love to create and maintain. I don't want to turn my service into a moras of pop-up ads and spam emails, after all having to wade through a bunch of junk mail seems pretty aesthetically to the purpose of having a low bandwidth service. So, I'm making you the "customer", and not the "product", and because of that, my focus will always be on serving the customer

I don't exactly no how much shelf life a service like this will have. Just like in the 2010s when the rise of smartphones and cellular internet made two-way pagers obsolete, maybe upcoming services like Starlink will mean that anyone everywhere can get high bandwidth data. But I still think that there will always been a need for lo-fi, low bandwidth, information services. After all, in an age of digital radio, you can still drop down the HF dial and hear people regularly communicating with morse code on CW.

-- McKinley

Price

When we launch ElmerEmail, we are targeting a cost for the service of $12 per year. This should be enough to cover our costs and incentivize future development.

We will be taking various forms of payment. We will setup all the usual suspects like Credit Cards, PayPal, etc, etc. But because we know that this service is going to be useful to a very specific community, we are also going to "think outside the box". Our plan is also allow payment in cash when we setup at various events such as Hamfests, or other places where people who might find this service useful gather. We are also looking to methods that would allow users to pay for the service SECURELY entirely by email, though that idea is still VERY experimental.