Why we price by volume, not contacts

The last product we ran had 140,000 people in its email list and wrote to about 9,000 of them in a typical month. The bill was for 140,000. Every quarter somebody would propose pruning the list to save money, and every quarter somebody else would point out that the people we would prune were the ones most likely to come back. So we paid for silence.

Contact-based pricing made sense when an email platform was mostly a database. You paid for storage, and the storage was the product. That has not been true for a decade. Storage is close to free. What costs money is sending: the infrastructure, the reputation work, the bounce handling, the support ticket when a campaign lands in spam. So that is what Herald charges for.

The arithmetic

A message costs us roughly the same whether it goes to a list of ten or a list of ten thousand. The expensive parts are per-message, not per-person: the delivery attempt, the retries on a soft bounce, the webhook, the seven days of logs. If you email your whole list once a quarter, you cost us very little, and a contact-based plan would be charging you for a quarter of nothing.

The other way round is also true. A team that emails five hundred people every hour is doing real work on our infrastructure, and a contact-based plan would charge them almost nothing for it. Volume pricing is not a discount; it is the price matching the cost.

What that changes in practice

• You never prune a list to save money. Keep everyone; email the ones who matter.
• Transactional and marketing mail count the same. A receipt is a message. A newsletter is a message.
• A quiet month is a cheap month. Seasonal products stop paying in the off-season.

The one place volume pricing bites is the sender who has a small list and writes to it constantly. If that is you, the Hobby plan's three thousand messages a month go further than you would think, and the Pro plan's fifty thousand is more than most products send in a quarter.

Charge for the thing that costs money. Everything else is a subscription to someone's spreadsheet.

The plans are on the pricing page. If the arithmetic does not work for your product, tell us; we would rather adjust the plan than lose the argument.