Comments on: Celery’s “computer free emailing” Would you pay $273 a year for a 50 page per month fax service?

By: BubbaRay

BubbaRay — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 11:01:21 +0000

23, Andrew, I tried to email my lawyer (of 20 years) last week and still haven’t gotten a reply. Was giving him a new assignment for real cash. He hasn’t replied yet. Going through the telephone is so painful — he’s in a meeting, he’s out of town, he’s at lunch, let me take a message, etc. And if I do get through after 10 minutes of wasting my time, he says, “well, why didn’t you just send me a fax?” Good grief.

Good luck to you.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 09:56:10 +0000

Thanks BubbaRay.

If you take a look at how my own mother (who hates computers) sends an email, she simply handwrites “Andrew” at the top of the page. Then presses 2 buttons. Or, she can write “family”, and that will send out 25 emails simultaneously. Dan, you can’t do that with the fax services companies. I can’t see my 79 year old mother punching in 23 telephone numbers and sending the same piece of mail 23 times. Writing “family” at the top of the page is a lot simpler.

We married my mother’s world (handwriting, tv, phone & newspapers) with ours – PDA, laptop, cell phone.

What’s cool is that our customers never use the term “email”, because they know that Celery invented something for them, and they are right. So, they use the term “I received a Celery”, “I sent a Celery”… BTW, the cost is technically $8.25/month for black & white service or $11.58/mo for color service. We sell the color fax machine ($120) to make it simple for the person who lives in Cleveland to purchase it for their parent in Florida.

Thanks all, we realized that we need to do a better job of explaining our pricing ; )

By: dan

dan — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 00:55:53 +0000

Try MyFax.com for $10 a month, up to $100 faxes-You email their fax number @myfax.com& they receive your page(s). You get an 800 number to get faxes back via email!

By: BHK

BHK — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 19:38:43 +0000

$25 a month doesn’t sound too bad for someone who doesn’t want to pay for dialup or broadband, or deal with computer hassles. No spam, no viruses, no calls to tech support, no visits from GeekSquad or whatever, etc. Some people might find the convenience well worthwhile.

By: Lauren the Ghoti

Lauren the Ghoti — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 17:11:46 +0000

Well, it’s good to have faith in one’s product…

By: BubbaRay

BubbaRay — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 13:29:15 +0000

18 Andrew — you’re right, and I wish I had a piece of that biz. Boomer relatives, lawyers, doctors, etc. They all have and use a darn fax. It won’t go away anytime soon. Wonder about the growth, however.

Just another 2 new gold coins worth…

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 10:27:58 +0000

First, a comment about the price. The service is $139.00 per year for color service, or $99/year for black & white. People can purchase a device from us for $120.00, so the total package is $259.00 first year assuming you purchase both a device and color service from us.

Second, there are 55mm adults in America who aren’t online. It’s hard to believe but it’s true. 30mm of them are seniors. Their world is the TV, telephone and newspaper. We developed a way for them to communicate with their families via email in a very simple way.

100% of households have televisions, 86% DVD players but only 76% of households have computers, and 18% of those aren’t being used.

We are different than the fax service providers because they turn computers into fax machines, we turn fax machines into email devices. We have significant telephone charges that’s why the maximum sends & receives number is what it is. Further, our customers sends and receives, on average, mirrors that number.

We made the product gift priced. Boomer aged children are buying it for their parents mainly. Sorry for the long post, but our customers love the thing.

Thank you.

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 09:26:36 +0000

What every happened to the Mail Station?

By: doug

doug — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 03:47:18 +0000

It sounds stupid to me, too.

But, OTOH, when was the last time you worried about getting a virus from opening a fax?

I can state personally that the legal profession still greatly relies upon faxes, primarly because you need signed copies of things and the one-stop at the fax machine is simpler than the sign-scan-email combination in most offices. Plus there is sheer inertia. People keep doing things because that is the way they always did it.

By: jbellies

jbellies — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 20:02:19 +0000

You can get it free (with limitations):
http://www.savetz.com/fax/free_fax.php
I used tpc.int (free) for years. Coverage was about half of the world. Haven’t had to send a fax for so long now, though….
Or my own ISP allows users to forward an email to a local fax number, for no extra charge over the $cdn4.95 per month fee.
I use efax for the *opposite*. Somebody sends a fax, and efax turns it into a graphic email. It’s great–and free. Just that it has been a long time since anybody has faxed me anything!

By: TJGeezer

TJGeezer — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 18:58:41 +0000

12 – You’re right, and there may be legal reasons to believe that if it ain’t on paper, it ain’t real. But nowadays even real estate contracts are signed and sent by fax (including scan-and-send email) with snail mail backups. for the recording side.

Greg Allen (5) is probably also right. People who travel a lot and have to send legal documentation back and forth might find this service useful.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 18:54:39 +0000

By: BubbaRay

BubbaRay — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 18:14:42 +0000

I still contend that doctors and lawyers will not conduct biz via email — for some arcane reason they’ll use only fax. Perhaps the paper trail is required by law. But I see both sides of the argument. I’d still like to send my aunt a picture of my new grand-niece without snail mail. The snail mail can wait until the kid looks a little better

By: inspirefly

inspirefly — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 17:45:30 +0000

It does seem like a rip off, but really it’s not that bad, I just bought that same printer/fax for about $80, they sell it for $120, that’s not too bad. And then the service is really $140 a year, which is cheaper then efax. I wouldn’t get it myself but it’s too really that bad of deal when you check out the site and do the real math.

By: Ballenger

Ballenger — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 17:15:40 +0000

In the 90s I was with a company that provided a centralized fax, voice and Internet storage and retrieval service for information. Most of these organization’s previous methodology required an army of interns and a Fed-X budget that would feed a small third world country. As it became more obvious (to everyone except faxphiles) that the Internet would for the most part replace faxing, we made an effort to wean customers off the fax segment of the service. One of the reasons was maintaining the fax side cost roughly triple that of the Internet side. VoIP and FoIP wasn’t what is it today. Dialogic boards, Brooktrout boards, channel banks and the, always a bargain, addition of local numbers on T1s made providing the fax service a major pain in the budget. Well, the Faxies didn’t see it that way. We raised the price of the fax service thinking that would move users off faxing, they bitched and continued to use it. We raised the price again, they bitched louder and continued to use it. You say, “well that’s dumb”. Sure, but these were the same folks who called our tech support lines befuddled over not being able to load rolls of thermal fax paper on their plain paper fax machines. We sold the business a few years later, but in talking to the new owners over the years, I always ask, “still doing the Fax thing?”. The answer is still, “yes, damn-it, it won’t go away”. So I’m not surprised this service is around and over priced.