We charge $4.50/page for letters and in the beginning we simply counted lines and one page equaled 50 lines. We soon found this didn't work because some people send long lines and some people only have a few words on a line. Also, some copy the old letter below their new letter and the program I had to add up the lines counted the old letter in with the new.

After some experimentation I decided to simply fill up a page with 10 point Courier text. I did that by copying chunks of letters from clients with normal paragraph breaks until I filled all of one printed page. I did this across five pages, then counted each word of the five pages and found that if you try hard you can squeeze about 600 words of English onto a page. That became the yardstick for page size.

Then we built a visual basic program to count the words in a letter, and post them in an Access database. We installed a real world rule. We know that it is just as difficult to move and print and translate a single small letter as a single full page. Most of the expense of your email is moving and tracking it, and then printing it in Sochi. Most of the costs of the first page are fixed except for the ink and the translation. From this we made the decision to charge any part of a first page as one whole page. Beginning on the second page we charge by the 1/2 page fraction of the page. So when you get a miscellaneous account billing you will see page lengths separated to the nearest 1/2 page, after the first page. We then multiply that by $4.50/page - the least expensive mail movement and translation that we know about, and thus bill your account.

Simple description. It's $4.50/page for the first page no matter how little you write, and after that it is $4.50 per page (a page is about 600 words), measured in fractions of 1/2 page.

Whew.