This article was published in 2026 and references a historical event from 2006, included here for context and accuracy.
- Tension: Platforms profit from infrastructure while attempting to externalize operational costs onto the legitimate users who create their value.
- Noise: Verification fees and deliverability charges are presented as quality improvements rather than cost-shifting strategies that benefit platforms.
- Direct Message: Infrastructure costs are fundamental business expenses, not optional burdens to monetize through user fees and sender penalties.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
In February 2006, Eric Thomas, CEO of email list management company L-Soft, published a commentary that would prove remarkably prescient.
Responding to AOL’s partnership with Goodmail Systems to charge email senders for guaranteed delivery, Thomas argued that spam fighting was simply a cost of doing business, not a burden to shift onto legitimate senders.
Twenty years later, as platforms from X to major email providers experiment with verification fees and deliverability charges, his critique reveals a pattern that has only intensified: platforms attempting to monetize the very infrastructure costs that are fundamental to their business model.
The 2006 AOL-Goodmail arrangement allowed companies to pay between 0.25 and 1 cent per email for certified delivery that bypassed spam filters.
AOL framed this as cost-sharing for spam prevention infrastructure. Thomas called it “barking at the wrong tree” and argued that treating spam costs differently from other operational expenses showed “a distorted view of the industry.”
His analysis wasn’t just about email. It identified a fundamental tension in how platforms approach their relationship with users who create value on their infrastructure.
The economics of shifting burdens
The tension Thomas identified runs deeper than spam filtering. Platforms exist because users create value on them. Email providers need senders and recipients. Social networks need content creators and audiences. Cloud services need developers building applications.
Yet these same platforms consistently attempt to reframe essential operational costs as optional premium services that users should pay extra to guarantee.
When AOL suggested in 2006 that it had “generously provided a free whitelist” for years, Thomas recognized the language for what it was: repositioning basic service delivery as charity.
A whitelist isn’t generosity. It’s how email systems distinguish legitimate traffic from abuse. It’s as fundamental to email service as routing is to postal delivery.
The platform business model depends on this infrastructure working reliably. Without it, users leave for competitors.
This creates an uncomfortable reality for platforms. The costs of operating infrastructure at scale are substantial and ongoing.
Spam filtering, content moderation, security systems, and delivery optimization require continuous investment. But these costs exist because the platform chose to operate at scale.
They’re not imposed by legitimate users. They’re the predictable consequence of building a system that mediates communication between millions of parties.
What Thomas understood in 2006, and what platforms have struggled with ever since, is that infrastructure costs can’t be selectively monetized without fundamentally changing the platform’s value proposition.
When you charge senders for delivery, you’re no longer providing email service. You’re selling access to recipients. When you charge for verification, you’re no longer authenticating identity. You’re selling visibility.
The service transforms from infrastructure into gatekeeper.
How premium features disguise cost externalization
The noise surrounding platform economics comes from how these cost-shifting strategies are marketed.
They’re rarely presented as “we want users to pay for our operating expenses.” Instead, they’re framed as quality improvements, security enhancements, or premium features that benefit everyone.
X’s decision to charge for verification illustrates this pattern perfectly. The blue checkmark was originally authentication, confirming that an account belonged to who it claimed to be. When X began charging $8 monthly for verification, the framing emphasized reduced bot activity and improved user experience.
But authentication costs don’t justify $8 per user monthly. What changed was the business model. Verification shifted from infrastructure service to revenue stream, with the quality improvement narrative providing cover for cost externalization.
Email deliverability platforms like SendGrid and Postmark represent a more complex evolution of what AOL attempted in 2006. These services charge senders for guaranteed delivery and detailed analytics.
Unlike AOL’s direct fee-for-delivery model, deliverability platforms position themselves as solving problems that email providers won’t address.
Yet the underlying pattern remains: senders pay extra to ensure their legitimate messages reach recipients, subsidizing the infrastructure costs that email providers should cover as basic service delivery.
The challenge for legitimate senders is that once a platform establishes premium delivery tiers, free delivery inevitably degrades. Not necessarily through deliberate throttling, though that happens, but through resource allocation.
Development effort flows toward paid features. Support prioritizes paying customers. Infrastructure investment focuses on premium tiers.
The baseline service becomes adequate at best, pushing more users toward paid options not because they want premium features but because they need reliable basic service.
This creates what economists call a market for lemons problem. When platforms can’t distinguish between legitimate users willing to pay and bad actors, they create fee structures that punish everyone.
Spammers factor fees into their cost model and continue operating. Legitimate small senders either pay fees that make their business model unsustainable or accept degraded delivery.
The platform collects revenue while spam continues largely unabated.
What the data actually reveals
The essential insight Thomas offered in 2006 remains valid precisely because platform economics haven’t fundamentally changed. According to Kaspersky’s 2024 report, spam represents approximately 47% of global email traffic, down from peaks near 90% in the late 2000s but stubbornly persistent despite two decades of filtering innovation and sender fees.
Infrastructure costs are the price of operating a platform at scale, not optional expenses that users should subsidize through fees for basic functionality.
What matters isn’t whether platforms can charge for enhanced services. Premium features, advanced analytics, and specialized support represent legitimate value adds beyond baseline infrastructure.
What matters is whether basic operational costs get reframed as premium services, shifting expenses from the platform to users whose participation creates the platform’s value in the first place.
The platforms that succeed long-term understand this distinction.
Gmail doesn’t charge senders for delivery because Google recognizes that email infrastructure costs are part of providing email service.
AWS charges for compute and storage but doesn’t fee-gate basic security features because Amazon understands that infrastructure reliability is fundamental to the cloud service proposition.
These platforms monetize through scale, premium features, and adjacent services, not by making basic functionality contingent on user payments.
Recognizing cost-shifting before it becomes standard
Thomas’s critique of AOL’s Goodmail partnership matters today because it provides a framework for evaluating platform pricing decisions before they become industry standard.
When a platform introduces fees for what was previously baseline functionality, ask: Is this a genuine value-add or cost externalization disguised as improvement?
The verification fee model spreading across social platforms illustrates why this question matters. Authentication serves the platform’s interests as much as users’. Verified accounts reduce impersonation, improve content quality, and make moderation more efficient.
When platforms charge for verification, they’re not offering premium service. They’re monetizing infrastructure that benefits their entire ecosystem while positioning it as individual user benefit.
Email deliverability services represent a more nuanced case. These platforms genuinely provide value through detailed analytics, delivery optimization, and specialized support.
But their existence also reflects email providers’ failure to maintain baseline delivery quality for legitimate senders.
When senders pay third parties to ensure their messages reach recipients, we’re witnessing market response to deliberate infrastructure underinvestment by the original platforms.
The pattern Thomas identified in 2006 has proliferated across platform categories. API access fees, content creator verification requirements, and cloud security premium tiers all reflect the same underlying dynamic: platforms attempting to externalize operational costs onto users while framing it as optional enhancement.
Some of these fees represent genuine premium value. Others are infrastructure costs being monetized because platforms have market power to charge for what should be included in baseline service.
What distinguishes legitimate premium features from cost externalization is whether the platform would need to provide the functionality anyway to operate effectively.
Spam filtering, authentication, security, and delivery optimization aren’t optional platform extras. They’re fundamental requirements for operating communication infrastructure at scale.
When platforms charge extra for these basics, they’re not offering premium service. They’re shifting costs that their business model should absorb.
Twenty years after Thomas called out AOL’s cost-shifting strategy, platforms continue testing how much infrastructure expense they can externalize to users.
The language changes, but the underlying economics remain constant. Infrastructure costs are business fundamentals, not burdens to monetize through user fees.
Platforms that understand this distinction build sustainable businesses. Those that don’t create short-term revenue while degrading the user experience that made their platforms valuable in the first place.
