I don’t include email or SMS costs in my managed hosting offering. If you’re sending email through AWS, SendGrid, or SparkPost, you pay them directly. Same with SMS via Twilio. Here’s why.
I’m not interested in pass thru costs and adding a markup because it’s not in your best interests. FWIW, this cost will range from $5 to $20/mo. If you go with AWS, it is extremely reasonable at $0.10/1000 emails.
Email and SMS are utilities. They should be transparent to you. When those costs get bundled into a platform fee, you’re just moving towards more vendor lock when it really isn’t needed.
And when you have spikes in email or SMS sending, I don’t need to be tracking that either. These massive companies have perfected their systems for doing so anyway. Paying directly to the actual “utility provider” means you pay for what you use, and that’s it. No quota cap middle-man that always has some unused credits (aka your money) leftover at the end of the month.
Here’s the deal:
Where I actually add value: helping you design and manage a CiviCRM system that saves staff time. Deciding what’s worth automating and what sacrifices can be made. Building reports and dashboards that provide insight. And as for mass mailings? The decisions around how to collect and report on your constituents so you can send to specific groups easily via smart segmentation.
Sure, I do provide hosting but that’s to gain efficiency working with several organizations and allows clients to get to the important decisions, not dealing with the admin overhead.
It comes down to value. And it’s not me bundling other services for your “convenience”. You pay vendors for infrastructure. You pay your preferred CiviCRM partner for judgment, clarity and achieving progress.