I have spent some more time thinking about MICE fees, and have come up with a few more ideas. The more I think about it, I can see how donations to MICE can easily be expected to cover one time hardware costs. However there are recurring costs that I do not foresee donations being able to keep up with for the long term. I estimate that if you did not account for donations towards recurring costs, MICE would have about $9000/year in expenses. This includes space/power/ARIN fees for it's own IP addresses. Based upon the current membership, this would be approx $30 per month per member. I am sure that most members would opt to pay quarterly, or biannually based on the small size of the bill. I am sure that automated electronic invoices could be setup to reduce the administrative billing load. While I do agree that Free is a simple marketing tool, when I have mentioned that MICE is free to some larger ISPs that I do business with, the first thing that I have heard back on several occasions is along the lines of how reliable can it actually be if nothing other than donations is going into maintenance of the exchange. On the other hand I realize that for the small provider, Free can be a huge marketing tool. This leads me to ponder an article I saw on the news a few years back. They were talking about a restaurant that did a social experiment where when the register rang up the total for the food ordered, it was listed as a suggested value. The customer then had the option to pay what they wanted (or not pay at all). The results after several months of operation was that the over payment cancelled out the underpayment, and the restaurant remained in financial good standing. I feel it is very possible that in-between a suggested monthly value of connecting to MICE, along with the traffic graphs to provide a visual value that most members would want to pay on their own, within a month or two, most members will realize the value, and start to contribute. MICE also has the luxury of a couple of years before the recurring expense donations run out, where something like this could be tried out, and any extra could be saved up so that if mandatory fees did need to be assessed in the future, they would not be so shocking to some members right out of the gate. Jeremy Lumby Minnesota VoIP 9217 17th Ave S Suite 216 Bloomington, MN 55425 Main: 612-355-7740 Direct: 612-392-6814 E-Fax: 952-873-7425 jlumby@mnvoip.com ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the MICE-DISCUSS list, click the following link: http://lists.iphouse.net/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=MICE-DISCUSS&A=1