Postini, a popular spam filtering service (also filters viruses and has some other cool features) purchased by Google a while back, just dropped their prices “like a rock.” The drop is for business users, but on top of the new price, non-profits and education customers get an additional 66% off! That’s two-thirds, folks! Apparently Google is trying to play the Microsoft Charity Pricing game, and I say let ’em play! (If you’re a non-profit organization not getting Microsoft’s charity pricing, don’t buy any Microsoft products until you learn about it! Ask me for details if you’re too lazy to use Google, or if you want the contact info for the sales reps I use.)

I’m waiting to hear from a Google sales representative to confirm pricing and details, but based on this pricing chart, it looks like the non-profit pricing for their highest level of service will only be $8.33/mo, or less than 70 cents per month, per user. We’re paying more than twice that for our current hosted anti-spam, anti-virus filtering service, and it doesn’t do message archiving! Basic spam filtering would be only $1/year/user, or the mid-range plan adding some security features would go up to a whopping $4/year/user. I sure hope I’m reading these prices right, ’cause if I am, Postini will be getting another customer!

Interestingly, the pricing chart is for Postini as an add-on to Google Apps for your Domain, which has a free premium version for non-profits. The chart is not specifically for the Postini stand-alone service. However, if necessary, that service does let you dual-deliver messages both to the Google webmail interface and to your own email server, so setting up a free account to get the Postini pricing wouldn’t be a humongous deal. However, I’m curious to see what the pricing will be for Postini without going through Google Apps! My suspicion is…it will be comparable. When I submitted a request to talk to them, they replied and said they have a lot of people to contact due to the new pricing. No kidding!

(Hat tip: Jason Powell via #citrt).