Email Costs

Why do you charge for emails? Shouldn't emailing be free?

We agree that emails are very ubiquitous and easy for individuals to use. Anyone can sign-up for a free email address and starting sending and receiving emails with a provider of their choice!

However, for sending 10s of thousands of emails per month for a platform like Lightpost, there are a number of factors to consider.

Factors to Consider

There are a number of things that a large email provider has to consider to make sure that emails arrive in your inbox as expected.

Large end-user email service providers like Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook and others will quickly start sending your mass emails to spam, or worse, reject your emails that you're trying to send to your Lightpost groups.

These factors include things such as:

• Spam complaints (almost always accidental!)

• Invalid email addresses (bounces)

• Unsubscribe and resubscribe requests

• Email domain reputation - to keep messages out of the junk folder of your users

Email Provider Industry

These factors have become an exponentially increasing concern for email providers over the last few years. Both for emails and SMS proviers. This has resulted in a large increase in costs, as well as many additional verification and validation hoops to jump through with email providers.

As a point of proof: recently other church apps have stopped offering email as a method of communication altogether due to the complexities of dealing with email correctly.

Email Provider Costs

Just to give an example: Postmark is an exceptional email provider, who is very strict about how many spam complaints you're allowed to have before you're kicked off the platform.

Their email service starts at $1.80 per 1,000 additional emails sent. This is currently 50% higher than what Lightpost charges.

Future Costs

Lightpost is continually evaluating service providers and seeking options to lower costs for the Lord's church. We're working hard to avoid having to increase costs in the future, even though service providers are increasing their costs.