Our Future Plans

January 25th, 2010 by Andres | 5 Comments

Dear PostageApp beta users,

It’s been a pleasure to welcome so many of you to PostageApp.com over the past few days. We’ve received a number of requests for more info on our future plans, so thought it best that we “Reply All.”

The Working Group built PostageApp back in early 2009 to meet our own app-generated emailing needs. Our goal is now to grow and improve PostageApp into a premier mail handling app, made by developers for other developers. We want to help devs simplify their app-driven email system, saving them time so they can make their core application even better.

And so everyone understands up front where things will be going, we’d like to share our thoughts on pricing:

1. There will always be a free plan. Our current thinking is that the free plan will include:

Up to 25 emails per day, no cap on the total # of emails sent.
Send email using our SMTP server or your own.

2. After beta, there will be paid plans. You can expect these plans to be very value conscious and sit somewhere in the range of pricing you see at Hoptoad, Unfuddle, and Basecamp.

3. Regarding the current beta:

We will also be contacting some users and asking for information about you and your app, so that we can continue to develop Postage with your (and our) needs in mind.
In return for your help, we invite our beta users to use Postage to the fullest, and ignore the current sending limits on the beta account – when using your own SMTP server.
We don’t want to promote spam, but we also don’t want to enforce restrictions for high-volume users, so we encourage developers to test-drive PostageApp during our free beta, and see if you like it.

Thanks and enjoy!

P.S. PostageApp is against spam, and we’ll be very quick to ban account holders that abuse the system.

Posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 5:54 pm TO New Features.
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Dermot

Thanks guys, this looks good as long as there’s going to be an inexpensive paid option to run the mail on my smaller apps.
Steve Eley

What a terrific idea! We’re a small non-profit, but the Web site I’m rebuilding sends a fair amount of email, so AuthSMTP and its competitors were a poor choice compared to running our own SMTP server on a cheap VPS. But dealing with log files for tracking and error management really is a pain.

I’m looking forward to integrating your beta into our system, and if that works out we’re sure to become a paying customer. The only suggestion I’d make regarding your pricing would be to make sure that it’s based on average load, or else make the billing flexible month-to-month; and when limits are exceeded, please simply raise the price on the following cycle instead of cutting off sending. (At least for those of us using our own servers.) Many applications are subject to email spikes coinciding with particular events, and having delivery fail even once because of one-time quota issues would counteract a lot of positive perception from the service’s benefits.
http://www.theworkinggroup.ca andres

@Dermot: That’s the plan. We definitely want to give low-volume users a valuable plan.

@Steve: You make a great point about not penalizing users for sudden spikes in emails. We will take your suggestions under strong consideration when finalizing pricing plans. Thanks for your input… Much appreciated.
http://www.9lessons.info Srinivas Tamada

I’m using.. at http://labs.9lessons.info
http://blog.programmableweb.com/2010/02/22/use-postage-to-send-email-from-web-apps/ Use Postage to Send Email From Web Apps

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