SpotWalla officially became a paid-for service on Tuesday, February 1st. Since the accounting processes run a day behind you would not have seen any activity in your account until the following day. And while I'm sure a good number of you have looked over your account to ensure your understanding of how funding works jives with how it really works, in this newsletter we'll use my personal account as an example and go through it together.

As you know SpotWalla's fees come in two flavors. Storage & Map Views and Device Activity. Each day we examine your account to determine the appropriate fees to deduct from your account. Storage & Map Views are assessed if your account has 1 or more messages/locations. Device Activity is the act of polling a SPOT or InReach, or a phone app using the Web API or a Zoleo or other device using an email interface.

Over the last 14 years I've created eleven devices in my account of various flavors - SPOTs, InReaches, Bubbler, SWTracker, Zoleo and Generic. Some are active and some haven't been used in years. We've been live five days now. Here's what my account fee summary looks like in the Account Manager:

Let's start with the easy one. Storage & Map fees are deducted each day my account has one or more messages. To see the daily detail for "Storage & Map Views" click the line in the Summary section. Here's mine:

As expected, SpotWalla deducted 4 cents each day from my account for a total of 20 cents.

Device activity is different. Since each device is taken into consideration, the fees are dependent on the activity of each device. To see the daily detail for "Device Activity" click the line in the Summary section. Here's mine:

Reading from bottom to top... For the first two days both SPOTs and an InReach were polled and, therefore, considered active. SpotWalla deducted 3 cents from my account for each device for a total of 9 cents per day.

On the 3rd day the SPOTs and InReach were active. I also used my Bubbler device. Since four devices were considered active on the 3rd day, SpotWalla deducted 12 cents from my account.

On the 3rd day I deactivated the InReach and the Gen III SPOT. So on the 4th day the only device with activity was the Gen 4 SPOT. SpotWalla deducted 3 cents from my account.

On the 4th day I activated the Gen III SPOT again. So on the 5th day SpotWalla deducted 6 cents from my account.

It's my hope that, since going live, users are beginning to understand how SpotWalla assesses fees and the advantage and fairness of this process. If you use it, you pay for it. Granted, it's difficult to not "use" Storage & Map Views, but you have complete control of the Device Activity fees all within your SpotWalla account.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please email SpotWalla Support and we will help.

Thanks,
SpotWalla Support