License terms and ownership
The €1,499 license fee delivers a perpetual licence for
PowerMTA, sourced through our authorised reseller
arrangement with Bird. The license key is registered
against your operation's identifier (which we negotiate
with the upstream registrar without requiring
government-ID KYC on your end; the registration is
operational, not regulatory). If you decide to leave us
and move infrastructure to another provider, the license
key moves with you; we provide license documentation and
handover support.
What lifetime covers: indefinite use of the version
installed at handover. PowerMTA versions support
multi-year operational lifespans without modification;
Bird typically issues major version updates every 18-30
months and minor patches more frequently. Major version
upgrades after handover are not covered by the lifetime
license; we maintain access to current versions through
our reseller relationship and can quote upgrade pricing
when relevant. Most customers run a major version stably
for 3-5 years before updating.
What lifetime does not cover: Signals analytics platform
(Bird's separate analytics product, requires its own
subscription), enterprise consulting from Bird directly
(out of scope of our reseller arrangement), and any
upstream changes Bird makes to commercial terms after
your license is issued (those affect future purchases,
not your existing license). The license is bulletproof
against future commercial changes; future purchases would
be at then-current pricing.
Hardware sizing rationale
PowerMTA's bottlenecks are CPU (queue processing,
DKIM signing), RAM (queue state in memory), and disk
I/O (accounting log writes). Network is rarely
bottleneck below 10 Gbps because SMTP delivery is
latency-bound, not throughput-bound; one slow receiver
does not slow others.
Iron-E3 (4 cores, 32 GB) sustains the queue management
for ~1M daily messages with reasonable peak headroom.
DKIM signing on E3-1245v6 reaches 8,000-12,000 signatures
per second across cores, which translates to roughly
1.5-2x the daily message rate as headroom. At 1M daily,
peak-hour rate around 80,000/h fits comfortably in this
envelope.
Iron-E5 (14 cores, 64 GB) handles 5M daily because the
core count parallelises queue scheduling more
effectively. At peak hours of 400,000/h, multiple
receiver queues run concurrently without scheduling
conflict. 64 GB RAM provides headroom for queue
backlogs during receiver backoff (queued messages stay
in memory until delivery or expiration).
Iron-EPYC (24 cores, 128 GB) reaches 20M+ daily because
PowerMTA scales cleanly across cores once queue
partitioning has enough work to distribute. EPYC's PCIe
4.0 NVMe throughput keeps accounting log writes from
becoming I/O-bound. At very high volumes (50M+ daily),
dual-EPYC configurations or horizontal scale across
multiple PowerMTA nodes becomes the architecture; we
quote those configurations on request.
Horizontal scaling architecture
Single PowerMTA nodes scale to roughly 50M daily
messages on appropriate hardware before queue management
overhead dominates. Above that, multi-node architectures
distribute traffic across PowerMTA instances. Common
patterns: 2-4 nodes load-balanced via DNS round-robin,
each with non-overlapping IP allocations, accounting
logs streamed to centralised storage for unified
reporting. The configuration replicates across nodes
(modulo IP differences); we deploy multi-node
architectures as custom engagements.
Multi-jurisdiction sending follows the same horizontal
pattern with the additional consideration of latency:
PowerMTA nodes in different jurisdictions run
independently, with traffic routed at application level
based on origin or compliance requirement. We deploy
this pattern frequently for operators needing both EU
and APAC presence; the per-node cost remains the same,
orchestration adds operational complexity that some
customers handle in-house and others delegate to us as
consulting.
Updates and upgrades
PowerMTA security patches issued by Bird are forwarded
to customers within 30 days of release; we test patches
in our staging environment before recommending
deployment. Major version upgrades require commercial
conversation: lifetime licence covers the version at
handover, major version transitions are typically
€499-799 depending on version delta. Most operations
stay on a major version for 3-5 years; the upgrade
decision depends on whether new features matter to your
operation.
