How much is peace of mind worth to you?
As Bulc Club continues to grow, we continually return to the idea that email should always be free. It’s a basic freedom that we’ve all enjoyed since the inception of the internet and we have no intention of changing that. In fact, Bulc Club doesn’t even offer an email service. We’re simply an email filtering and forwarding service with the mission of ridding the world of spam and bulkmail, forever.
Bulc Club offers a free account, which allows you one forwarder with no filtering by Member Rating. And we offer free, disposable, single-use email addresses—called BulcBurners—that you can create and use daily. These services will always be free and they piggyback on your free personal email accounts to help deter and diminish spam in your inbox.
Should you find value in unlimited forwarders and email filtering by Member Rating, we also offer two additional types of membership—Annual and Monthly—which are supported by membership dues ($8.25-$10/mo, respectively). The dues help us to pay for the cost of our servers and the infrastructure required for sending out millions of emails every second.
As more members join the club, two wonderful things begin to happen:
- Member Ratings catalog a greater number of addresses and domains and become more accurate at detecting the likelihood of a sender being a spammer
- Membership dues decrease as a greater number of members can finance our operational costs with a smaller amount of money
In short, member personal inboxes are cleansed of spam, better, faster, and cheaper.
As an additional incentive, Bulc Club even offers free months of membership to members who refer their friends and family. Theoretically, if you refer 12 people a year, and they join our club, your membership is free!
Despite these benefits, we still see our prospective members indecisive about switching from free accounts to monthly or annual membership—and we absolutely understand the hurdle. We all agree that email should always be free, so it’s difficult to endorse paying for a service that simply filters and forwards email. In conversations with people every day, we ask: “How much is peace of mind worth to you?” Yet, it’s still met with opposition. It seems that most of us would rather deal with stress than pay to eradicate it.
So we started thinking a little about what costs $10 a month (or $100 a year), nowadays, and asked a number of our free members—those resistant to upgrade—where they spend their money. The results were fairly interesting:
- Streaming Music Services: Apple’s Streaming Music Service costs $10/mo or $120/yr for an ad-free experience, where iTunes Radio is free, but riddled with promotions (the audio version of spam).
- Commuting: According to a study by Citi, daily commuting costs have seen a boost in the last five years, now costing the average commuter about $10 per day for a trip to work, school or other daily activities.
- Gym Memberships: Planet Fitness offers a membership fee of $10/mo (or $120/yr) + $29 annual membership fee, the lowest we could find in the metropolitan area.
- Babysitting: According to a recent USA Today article, babysitters make an average of $10 per hour, though the number varies depending on where you live, amount of experience, number and age of children, etc.
- Postage: A book of twenty stamps ($0.49/ea) costs roughly $10/mo depending on how many snailmail messages you send.
- File Storage: An annual membership to Dropbox is $100/yr where Box.com touts $5-15/mo/user with a minimum of three users ($15-45/mo).
- Email: Microsoft Exchange providers, such as Rackspace, offer $10/mailbox/mo for email. Buy it direct with an annual commitment from Microsoft, and unlimited storage email is only $96/yr. Google Apps offers limited storage accounts for $5/user/mo, and unlimited storage for $10/user/mo.
Oftentimes, our decisions in spending money are based on eradicating stress, whether it be ad-free music or a half-hour on the treadmill or a night on the town without the kids. Driving ourselves to work is much less stressful than mass-transit, and the peace of mind that comes with storing our files on the cloud saves us the anxiety of losing the documents we need for work and home.
So if our spending habits are truly based on peace of mind and the alleviation of stress, then perhaps it’s simply the stigma of paying for a clean inbox that makes us complacent about upgrading? Whatever the case, talking with our free account-holders and paying members have really opened our eyes to some of the hurdles in growing our membership base. In order for us to meet our goals of getting more expansive, more accurate member ratings AND decreasing monthly and annual membership cost, we have to ask again: how much is peace of mind worth to you?
We’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.
Drop us a line: 201-683-9296 or send us an email and share your experiences and spending habits. If you’ve read this article and we’ve managed to change your opinion, give membership a try! We’d love your help in ridding the world of spam, forever.