This as good a time as any since this subject is going to have to be dealt with at some point:

Our Story So far...

As long time users know, the amount of traffic this site gets has steadily increased. This month something like 1.3 million unique individuals will visit this website.

Since the dot-com collapse, bandwidth prices have increasingly become painful because there's no realistic way to pay for the site via banner ads. We are getting ready to unveil Textbanners.net this next week and hopefully that will help (users can take out ads on the site directly for as little as $1 per day).

But realistically, we're at something like 50 megabits of bandwidth much of which is dedicated to this site.

Right now, Stardock pays for virtually all of the tab. The goal was always for WinCustomize to become self-sustaining. But as the site has grown, that hope has drifted further and further off. 

But to try to off-set costs, we instituted WinCustomize subscriptions. For $19.95 a user gets a 2 year subscription to the site which gives them unlimited downloads, 2 premium suites, and the WinCustomize browser along with 5,000 free impressions on TextBanners.net. 

Non-subscribers have been restricted to 50 megabytes of bandwidth they could consume in the form of downloads. You'll occasionally see a post by someone who suddenly discovers scruples and expresses his outrage and desire to defend innocent artists everywhere for having to pay to download more stuff. But it's been one of the few ways of getting people to subscribe or at least go away and go to some other site to download stuff.

Subscribers have helped us pay for new hardware, more bandwidth, etc. But it's still a fairly low percentage. Well not just fairly low but amazingly low (far less than 1% of visitors).

One reason for that is because Stardock customers are currently exempt from the bandwidth restriction. So are users with access levels Apprentice and up.

Who should pay the bills?

That's put Stardock in an awkward position. It's facing either having to raise the price on Object Desktop (the proposed price is $69.95 up front and $37.95 for renewals) or put some sort of cap on the amount of megabytes a non-subscriber Stardock customer can get. The proposal on that end is 250 megabytes.

We'd like to hear from you. Which way do you think is most fair? My opinion is that we should go with the 250 meg cap on SDof bandwidthvery few people download that amount of bandwidth so it would only affect a small percent (most of the bandwidth is used by a small percent btw).  Those users can contribute either by subscribing for $20 for 2 years or contributing in other ways (skins, themes, walls, message boards, etc. and gaining higher access).

What's your view?