Pete,<br><br>That $50 a month makes total sense, this is great to hear we happy to get on board with that as soon as possible.<br><br>Thanks, and I will be in touch shortly.<br><br>Jim<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 3:29 AM, Pete Davies <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:pete@automattic.com">pete@automattic.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">Hi all,<br>
I work with the Akismet team at Automattic, and given that the topic<br>
of Akismet pricing came up earlier on a different thread, it reminded<br>
me that it's long overdue that I let you know what we've tried to do<br>
for educational institutions and pricing.<br>
First, a little background: long before spammers started getting as<br>
sophisticated as they are now (and Akismet didn't cost us much to run)<br>
Matt and Toni would offer academic institutions free use of Akismet in<br>
return for a link promoting Akismet in the footer of every page that<br>
it was used on. We did this pretty much on trust, and we had no<br>
resources (or inclination) to enforce it. But it's been clear that the<br>
informality of the arrangement hasn't stood the test of time: API keys<br>
have been lent to non-academic projects, re-designs have abandoned the<br>
footer and perhaps critically (for us) supporting the weight of spam<br>
on .edu sites has become pretty expensive.<br>
As we gave Akismet more resources, we also revisited the signup and<br>
subscription processes. We tried to simplify and make clearer to those<br>
that get real value from Akismet that they should actually pay for the<br>
service. We had an Enterprise plan that was based around the number of<br>
sites, and an API plan that was based around the number of API calls<br>
(basically the number of comments submitted). Allowing users to pick<br>
between the two meant that almost all of our users could find a price<br>
point at which they were able to use Akismet, while contributing to<br>
the costs of running it. With one glaring exception...<br>
Academic WordPress installs do tend to be unique because they spawn<br>
huge numbers of individual sites, many of which are used for specific<br>
projects and are then abandoned (attracting lots of spam). This means<br>
that these installs tend to have (a) a lot of sites and (b) a lot of<br>
API calls.. making Akismet prohibitively expensive. But the<br>
misconception has been that we don't care about this: it's really not<br>
true, we just struggled to figure out a good solution for a while.<br>
In fact, the Enterprise (site-based) pricing didn't seem to work as<br>
well as we'd hoped for some companies too. Thinking about the<br>
edu/multisite problem and also the issues that some companies were<br>
having, we decided to simplify the plan altogether and said that for<br>
the Enterprise plan ($50/month) customers could now use Akismet on as<br>
many sites as they liked, but with a limit of 80,000 comments per<br>
month.<br>
So here's the exception: for .edu domains (only) using Akismet, we're<br>
waiving the comment limit restriction. So you can use one API key for<br>
a many sites as you like on your TLD, for $50/mo or $550/yr. So you<br>
can have as many sites using Akismet as you like, so long as they're<br>
hosted on either a subdomain or directory of [yourdomain].edu. There's<br>
one small caveat: we simply don't have the resources to manage<br>
invoicing, checks and Accounts Payable departments for this kind of<br>
price: so we ask that you/someone pays by credit card or electronic<br>
check. (You could also help my closing comments on unused sites.)<br>
So -- that's the situation as it is now, and hopefully goes some way<br>
to setting the record straight. It saddens me when I hear that Akismet<br>
is unaffordable for academic institutions and they've had to move to<br>
Typekit Antispam (if the age of their homepage and that Arrington<br>
quote is anything to go by, it's not getting a lot of love these days)<br>
or, worse, Captchas. Hopefully $50 a month makes it considerably<br>
easier than it used to be. I know that it won't work for everybody,<br>
but it might at least allow more of you to use the service.<br>
Happy to answer any questions and hear your feedback.<br>
Best,<br>
Pete.<br>
<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">--<br>
[ Pete Davies | Automattic Inc. | <a href="http://about.me/petedavies" target="_blank">http://about.me/petedavies</a> |<br>
<a href="mailto:pete@automattic.com">pete@automattic.com</a> | <a href="tel:%28415%29%20475-8007" value="+14154758007">(415) 475-8007</a> ]<br>
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