LFGSS survives by donations

You mention email costs are one of the biggest - I'm not sure what the default setting is, but I only have email notifications for new Private Messages. Would it be worth changing the default email notification settings for new users in an attempt to reduce email costs?

Our costs are actually low for what we do, so email is disproportionately a larger portion of them (28.9% of our monthly bill). Per-email it is very very cheap, the largest part of our email cost is just ensuring we are not classified as spam, which means paying for an IP address that is exclusively assigned to us and used by us.

Our email costs split over a number of tools too:

1. Mailgun (transactional emails and IP address)
   
2. MailJet (bulk emails and IP address)
   
3. Dmarcian (configuration and reputation tracking)
   
4. Google Apps (trivially small cost to make sure I can send and receive email for our domains, I think this is £2.75 per month, one of the very few GBP bills)
   
   

Mailgun is the biggest of those, and the IP address is by far the biggest chunk of that.

It can be done cheaper, but it's not a "send more or less mail" issue... it's a "do we end up in everyone's inbox, or their spam folder?" issue.

We basically pay to make sure that when we do send email, it really gets there.

So if you are selling something on LFGSS, and someone PMs you... the difference between you getting that email notification or not is whether we pay for email or not.

The volume of email is not the issue.

PS: And yes, it can be done cheaper. Amazon email prices look awesome, but would require me to write code to change lots to use it, and then test deliverability, and slowly migrate to it, etc. I think of things like this, but ultimately the cost isn't the end of the world, our costs are low and predictable and we run cheaper than any other site I know of at this scale, so really it's all just about making revenue as stable and predictable as outgoings.