What will you charge your subscribers per month?

As a nonprofit coop, we intend simply to charge what it costs to provide service. Thus a monthly charge to the subscriber must necessarily include the monthly fee paid to Qwest for the subloop ($8.73 or $15), a fair share of the traffic charges from the upstream connectivity provider, a share of the insurance policy that names Qwest as beneficiary, some money to help repay the loans for the startup costs with interest, and a share of the cost of the T1 data line.

At first we intend to charge $60 per month. Later, after the loans are repaid, we think the monthly cost may be able to drop to a smaller rate like maybe $35 or $40 per month.

We are planning to keep some sort of "capital account" for each subscriber. After each subscriber has paid the $60 for enough months to pay that subscriber's fair share of the startup costs and interest, we have in mind that the subscriber would be eligible to pay the smaller rate.

Subscribers will pay four times a year rather than monthly, to save us the administrative hassle of billing and running to the bank to deposit checks.