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Changes to Billing for Multiple Simultaneous Updates

This change may result in increased credit usage for non-digest subscriptions.

Am I Affected?

  • Digest Subscriptions are unaffected.
  • Owner-paid Feeds are unaffected.
  • Frequently updating real-time subscriptions are affected.

If you have questions regarding your specific subscriptions please contact FeedMail support.

Background

FeedMail pricing has always been 1 credit per email notification. However in practice FeedMail would charge at most 1 credit every time a feed was checked, even if there were multiple new items on that feed and multiple emails were sent. In other words FeedMail sometimes undercharged users.

Going forward, this billing error will be corrected, which may result in higher credit usage for feeds that were previously undercharged. Correcting this issue is essential to preventing abuse, ensuring long-term sustainability, and maintaining fair pricing.

Multiple updates are a rare occurrence. It usually happens on on feeds that update very often (faster than once every 5 minutes) or feeds that publish publish updates in batches. About 10% of feeds have seen multiple updates in the same check over the past month. 4% of feeds average more than 2 new items per check.

When Will this Change Occur?

This change will occur no sooner than November 18th.

Update: This is now live.

If you are affected by this change and don't have time to adjust please reach out to support within the next 30 days and we will help you out.

Managing your FeedMail Costs

If you are concerned about cost we recommend switching high-frequency subscriptions to digests. Digests group updates into a single email, allowing better cost control. Configuring a 5-minute digest for a fast feed will provide similar behavior to the previous billing scheme. Digests offer enhanced control, grouping frequent updates even from different feed checks. You can also set the frequency to hourly or daily digests for further cost reduction. Regardless of the number of updates, the cost remains one credit per five updated feeds.

Burst Protection

FeedMail continues to offer burst protection. This means that if a subscription suddenly posts more updates than usual credits will continue to be consumed at the usual rate. Only if the higher rate of updates continues for an extended period of time will credit consumption increase to match it. This protection has, and will continue to apply whether FeedMail discovers the updates in a single check or in different ones.

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