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<div id="newHeaderAG1" style="font-size: x-small; padding:1em;
background-color:rgba(220,220,240,0.4); border-radius:3px;"> <b>Subject:</b>
Re: Directions for Thunderbird legal and financial home<br>
<b>To:</b> Tb-planning <br>
<b>From: </b>Mark Rousell<br>
<b>Sent: </b>Tuesday, 14/07/2015 00:20:46 00:20 GMT ST +0100
[Week 28]<br>
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On 14/07/2015 00:02, Axel Grude wrote:<br>
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<div id="newHeaderAG1" style="font-size: x-small;
padding:1em; background-color:rgba(220,220,240,0.4);
border-radius:3px;"> <b>Subject:</b> Re: Directions for
Thunderbird legal and financial home<br>
<b>To:</b> Tb-planning <br>
<b>From: </b>R Kent James<br>
<b>Sent: </b>Monday, 13/07/2015 22:57:55 22:57 GMT ST
+0100 [Week 28]<br>
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<blockquote class=" cite" id="mid_55A43463_5050606_caspia_com"
cite="mid:55A43463.5050606@caspia.com" type="cite">Repeating
my previous scaling from LibreOffice, think $150,000 per year.
(To put this in perspective, the bandwidth costs using the AWS
CDN network to update approximately 25,000,000 users using a
full 40 MB update are around $35,000. We might find ourselves
limiting updates only because we cannot afford the bandwidth.
$150,000 is a small amount of income for a business with our
scale.).</blockquote>
<br>
This worries me. If only we could charge 10 cents per download;
that would resolve some of the bandwidth worries and possibly
provide extra funding... Or charge a dollar for a year round
downloads ;-) there must be a way to ease users into a
"subscription" model, however cheap it may be.<br>
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<br>
I think you were joking but a subscription for the core product
would never work. Subscriptions for ancillary services might well
be feasible though.<br>
<br>
That said (and as I said in another message in this thread),
charging for value added services also means more dev, maintenance
and hosting costs.<br>
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<br>
<blockquote type="cite"> a subscription for the core product would
never work.</blockquote>
<br>
I think what I am trying to say is that it is hard to believe that a
software that has 25 million regular users cannot even charge
everybody a pittance in order to make the software better and yet
everybody uses it daily and is moaning and groaning about all the
bugs that need to be fixed. We have talked about advertisement and
other monetisation methods (such as selling user's data, which is a
favorite with websites and some add-ons), but to me this huge number
of users is the giant Elephant in the room that nobody talks about.
<br>
<br>
The problem is, as soon as you make exchanging any money completely
voluntary, the participation drops by 99.95% <br>
<br>
I am just brainstorming, but if a yearly license was 1 Euro I would
buy 20 for my friends and relatives. The problem with the big user
numbers and donations is that too few know Kant's Imperative - if
they do not donate, nobody does and the project withers away.
Although I am sure everybody would be quite upset if Thunderbird
closed shop. What if you could reliably convince half of the users
to pay for Thunderbird? The rest can buy Postbox licenses or use a
web browser (only joking). <br>
<br>
I want an excellent, future proof, well known product for the
benefit of all who need desktop mail and not yet another free mail
client that will go into oblivion because, "gmail is free and
easier". Let's address the Elephant :) <br>
<br>
Axel<br>
<br>
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<b class="myName" style="text-shadow: 1px 1px 2px #DDD;
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href="mailto:axel.grude@gmail.com">Axel Grude</a></b>
<br>
Software Developer
<br>
Thunderbird Add-ons Developer
<span style="color:#666666; font-size:xx-small">(QuickFolders,
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