America Online has raised prices for its 'Bring Your Own Access' plan by $5 per month (now $15/month beginning in March), accordng to MacNN reader Jeff Melrose, who emailed AOL with concerns about the price hike: "As a member who does not need 2 hours of free roaming, and has not seen a new X.0 AOL client introduced for the Mac OS in several years, I am quite displeased that you have chosen to hike the prices."
Comments
here's hoping most choose to get off.
The only reason we had the BYOA plan was because many people still had our AOL e-mail addresses, and it took a while to find out who all needed our new addys. At the time AOL started offering BYOA, there was actually still some original content on AOL, and the chat rooms weren't all "N E hottiez in here?" and "any 15/16f wanna chat IM me" (there was that, but not nearly as bad as now). We also had several web sites hosted on our AOL member accounts, which had to be transferred to other free servers (with banner ads, unfortunately). Also, we have the AOL Visa card, so we often get discounts on our monthly fee anyway.
But that was years ago; with this rate hike, we'll definitely drop AOL. We hardly use it at all now, and if it weren't for the Visa card, we'd have probably dropped it a long time ago.
AOL is the biggest POS I have seen, I am AMAZED they get away with charging as much as they do! This is an incredible blow to the Mac community who has a AOL client which doesn't even offer the same features as the PC client. I will be cancelling very soon. I will not pay 15 a month for an e-mail acct. I can buy a domain for 15 a YEAR and get an e-mail acct @ myowndomain.com
The only reason I kept AOL for this long was because occasionally it was the only EASY way to send attachments to other AOL members. I have a speedy cable modem, so the BYOA access was an acceptable addition... even though I constantly marvelled at how universally BAD the system was!
AOL's system would often munge or choke on attachments from other ISP's so badly, that the only way I could send it reliably (albeit slowly) would be to send it FROM an AOL account TO an AOL account! What a pain.
Still, $15/month is too much to pay in order to workaround THEIR shortcomings. I'm finally gonna cancel -- but in the meantime have shifted to their "$4.95 for 3 hours" plan... that should be enough to cover me for a while.
Can anyone recommend any good e-mail addresses?
DracoDWS@aol.com
You can get netscape address for free. Then download Netscape 7 and you got all you need from AOL.
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Senior User
Joined: Mar 2000
Cluephone
If you have another ISP, you don't need AOL. What is the point of this service? Seems to me AOL is actually being reasonable about something - the rate hike is like saying "Hey, stupid! Get on or off, don't ride the fence!"