I would agree. I think my 2000 user corporation might consider it at 15 cents per user, but definitely not at $1. Our Bayesian filter catches 90%+ of our spam so that leaves Razor catching only one or two percent the other filters don't. Honestly, I'd probably just switch to DCC, since I've already had to whitelist most of my mailing lists so Razor doesn't catch them.
A way to look at it is what cost we would pay to _not_ get a spam. Maybe 5 cents per spam. A home user probably would not pay that, but a corporation might to reduce support calls. We receive probably 70,000 spams a year. That would make our spam blocking solution worth $3500 a year. If Razor was the only line of defense, it would definitely be worth the $2000 to block 70% of spam. But the value added benefit of Razor to catch an extra %2 the other filters don't get, that is hard to justify at $1 a user. Everybody has to eat, so Razor is going to go commercial since the developers working on it are full time. However, the pay-to-use business model is probably doomed long term. There would be more than adequate Razor servers for everyone to use if Razor had allowed all the ISP's that wanted to become servers to do so. Some other project will do the same thing, make the server code available, and there will be a large enough community of servers that it will be free for the small guy and cheap for the large guy even with small guys leeching. People will want to put up local servers for the local cache speed benefit, and the server ring will proliferate. Cloudmark is probably discovering as has Microsoft, that it is hard to charge a one-time fee for software and stay in business unless you can continue to add features and make your old software obsolete so people are persuaded to purchase upgrades. If they sell a caching server, once their customer base runs dry they run out of revenue, or have a greatly reduced revenue at a 20% yearly support fee. Whereas with a pay-per-user subscription service, it is much easier to attract venture capital and have a solid continuity to your business model since you don't rely on unpredictable "sales" of the initial product. That being said, our VP of Finance balks at any kind of recurring cost. One time costs such as capital expenditures, are much more palatable than yearly expenses. Companies hate recurring costs, so this will be a tough sale. My two cents, Fox #I think the best argument is that we are offering a valuable, #effective anti-spam service to the general community at large, and #that commercial organizations who utilize this service the most, those #who induce the greatest operational cost for running it, should help #contribute towards its upkeep. #--jordan ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Razor-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/razor-users
