Yes, ‘Christmas for Barracuda’, or ‘How high maintenance costs ruin a relationship’

So our Barracuda Spam Firewall cost around $2100 new, and to it’s credit it has worked rather well**.  However Barracuda is now charging us around $660 dollars for yearly maintenance?!  Really, more than of the 30% purchase price for maintenance?!  I don’t care what excuses they make, but this extortion level pricing is nothing more than a horrible mistreatment of their exiting customer base.

My advice at this point for those looking to buy such a solution is to look elsewhere, maybe to something that doesn’t have quite the vendor lock-in issue.

*Even though the GUI moves like molasses through a sieve and I’ve been waiting years for them to add the ‘auto power on’ ability to it so that I don’t have to go into work at two in the morning after a power outage just to turn the stupid thing on so that our e-mail will work.