For Christmas the brother-in-laws on Tammy’s side pick names. There are only four of us but we like the simplicity of just getting one name to pick better. For a couple of years now we’ve used a website called DrawNames.com to handle the name drawing, sending emails and even handling exclusions so you don’t get the same person every year. They sent an email asking for feedback and I felt like sharing some thoughts with them and decided I should share them publicly too.

I like your service a lot and if I had more name drawing groups at Christmas I would use it for sure. I’ve suggested your service to others and I know that at least some of them have used it. Everything went very smooth and I think you have the right email confirmations in place to make sure you don’t get “busted” email picks in spam folders.

With that said, I have a concern that your service makes enough revenue to be around. My alternative to using your service is to write a small script that will pick names and send emails. It would be ugly. Probably break a lot. Would likely not get delievered right. I’d rather use your service! I see that I can keep a wishlist and I’m sure that generates affiliate revenue, but I’m not sure many people do that. I know we don’t.

I would rather just pay a small fee for each name drawing group that I have. Maybe a $1? $2? I’m not sure what the right amount is, but I have a hard time seeing how you would make $1 off of our group now, so at least for us that would be an increase.

In addition to making me feel like your service will continue to be around, it would also give me confidence that you are not dropping remarketing cookies in my browser (you aren’t right?) and that my friends and family are not having their email addresses sold to others (which your privacy policy assures me is not happening already).

While I have your ear let me also thank you for not littering the site with link ads. Thank you for not requiring the use of Facebook connect or login with Twitter stuff.

That’s it. The service is nice and works really well. Just charge me something. :-)

My hope is that they have thought about charging before but assume that nobody would pay. It’s the Internet right? Nobody pays. But they do. They pay in droves for the right thing. This website is worth as much to me as many iOS apps I’ve bought for $0.99. Maybe if they hear customers saying they would pay, they can see the path to something that pays the bills and is worth keeping around clarify a bit.