All I'm saying, is give cheap a chance.

Keeping costs low has had both a major positive impact on SpamButcher's financials, and my own personal finance.

While I'd like to pretend that we have ample funds to throw at any SpamButcher related initiative, we don't. And even if we did, as the owner, I want to keep that money for my own pockets. I am all about keeping every penny I can.

Certainly any venture that costs $1 and yields $2 is a good deal - but often it's not that simple. There can be general categories of expenditures that are profitable, but really have multiple components - each with their own level of profitability.

For example, it may be that we spent $2000 in advertising for the month of June, which yielded $3200 in spam blocking software sales for July. But what if $2700 of those sales came from a single pay-per-click campaign that only cost $400? It's certainly worth spending a few hours analysis get answers to these questions.

Operating cheap is often about spending sweat equity instead of cash. When I park my car, I choose the lot an extra 4 blocks away to save $5 daily. In my case that works out to nearly a $1000 annually and I get a little extra exercise.

This can also be taken to an extreme. SpamButcher uses a pre-built POP3 email component we purchased for a few hundred dollars. We could have built it ourselves, but it likely would've taken a hundred hours or more to get it right. Our time is certainly worth more than $3 per hour.

Of course, some things have to be funded because they must. We'd never consider pulling the plug on our combat robotics division.

Looking at recurring costs is key to saving money. People often ignore daily expenses of under $10 or so, because they don't think it ever amounts to anything. As a quick rule of thumb, I try to evaluate recurring costs on an annual basis. Saving a dollar isn't a big deal, but saving $365 is worth spending a couple hours of my time.

Some costs need to be looked at for periods longer than a year. Many programs to filter spam charge an annual rate of twenty to thirty dollars for the privilege of getting the latest updates. SpamButcher doesn't work this way. You pay for it once, and get our updates free.

I won't reveal sales figures, but I will say that SpamButcher is saving users hundreds of thousands of dollars over other programs annually.

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