Some Changes to our SocketLabs On-Demand Billing

Corrected Charges for Suppressed Messages

You may be aware of our suppression system which blocks delivery to email addresses which are invalid or which have previously complained about your mailing. ISPs penalize you for attempting delivery to invalid addresses or addresses which have complained about your mailings, so the SocketLabs On-Demand suppression system is a safeguard we put in place, designed to give you the best deliverability possible.

Although it has always been our policy to charge for all messages sent to our servers (including messages we suppress) some of our billing systems were not fully updated, and because of that, suppressed messages may not have been charged properly to all SocketLabs On-Demand accounts. With the new update we are rolling out on January 13th, this will be corrected, and suppressed messages will be included in your message usage counts for the current billing period and going forward.

Reduced Charges for Bandwidth

SocketLabs On-Demand customers are now afforded a generous 128K average message size. In the past, we allowed 128K average bandwidth per message. The difference between average messages size and average bandwidth per message may seem subtle, but the new switch to base charges on messages size can represent a dramatic savings for our customers. Under the old method of charging for bandwidth, we had to charge for all bytes in and out. That meant that a 64K message would count as at least 128K, since it had to come into our servers AND go out of our servers. In addition to that, there is always overhead related to the network protocols which adds a bit more bandwidth. With the switch to billing based on message size, you get a full 128K per message.

Can I Send Messages Larger than 128K?

Yes, because we calculate your usage by averaging the total of all of your messages. For example, if you subscribe to a plan that includes 10,000 messages, you are given 1,280,000,000 bytes total. (10,000*128K). If your total usage goes over 1,280,000,000 bytes, then we bill you for the overage. Our current overage charge is $10 per gigabyte. By default any one message can be up to 10MB, though you can request a larger message limit by contacting support.