Captains,

I knew this day would come... And for the record, Rainbird has been one airline donating to the cause. Please read the attached from the VAFS news feed. Also, never fear... I will "pay-up" to keep Rainbird flying.. No worries...



After a long thought out process and talks with my family and I, we came to the conclusion that the time, effort, and money involved with keeping this system going and upgraded would take something more than a free service.

Starting April 1, 2008 there will be a monthly service cost for those VA's wanting to use the services provided by vafinancials.com
This will be a small fee, $5.99 US per month or $32.00 for 6 months (10% savings) per VA.

This small fee will allow me to provide you the following:
1. a fast and reliable server and update the server to make it faster.
2. improvement to the already good customer service.
3. updates to both the admin and pilot systems with improved features and many new ones.
4. the commitment to my customers that I will always strive to make vafinancials a quality service for them.
5. the ability to attract programmers that will help me grow vafinancials into a virtual world economy for VA's

This was not an easy decision to make and I hope that most of you will understand the amount of resources and time it takes to maintain and create a system like this.

I appreciate your support and hope to have you as a vafinancials member in the future.

Thanks
Michael Smith
vafinancials.com

Also a little blurb that further explains the issue and why Mike did what he did..

_____________________________

After countless forum posts trying to get people to donate to keep VAFS free, I can see where Mike has reached his limit, and now he has no choice to charge a small monthly fee for the use of his program to cover his costs. I think this is a good way to clean up all the fly by night VA'S so Mike can really concentrate on the hard core VA'S that take this hobby seriously. I look forward seeing how many VA'S will sign up for the use of VAFS. I know Mike has a huge amount of new ideas for VAFS and will make this a even greater program in the near future.

Tim
VAFSMP Team

Didn't see that one coming! ..... not!

So, how do we handle this as Rainbird? Six bucks a year for membership? Raffles at work? Gee, someone step in here for me. (this is called humor... )

Hi Pap,

It is $6 a month for the whole VA... I have already got it handled... It is one of these deals where I was AND wasn't surprised... Oh Well.. It is worth it to me!

Jeff

Agreed that it's worth it, and thanks to the boss for fronting the dollars.

vrn