UPDATE on March 7th: Thanks to this comment below, I’ve discovered that Postini has now made two of the three options available for non-profits via web-based ordering!

I received an email response from my request for a sales rep regarding Postini at non-profit prices. Here’s what they (in specific, Peter from The Google Message Security Team) said, in part:

We don’t actually have the non-profit pricing available online at this time. We’re working on making the non-profit pricing available directly online. We don’t have a specific timeline for that, but definitely check back with us later!

If you would still like to move forward with the non-profit pricing right now, I can forward you along to one of our direct sales representatives if you are planning on making a purchase of $1,500 USD or more.

So basically, unless we’re over three times the size we are, we have to wait. This is going to leave a bunch of churches and other non-profits waiting out in the cold for an undetermined length of time. Education customers may, in general, have larger email user bases to qualify for direct sales, but that’s just my guess. I hope their non-specific timeline is shorter rather than longer; perhaps they’re working hard on it right now but don’t have it up since the change is such a new announcement. There’s just no way to know yet, given this response. A note of some sort to this effect would be appreciated on the pricing web page, but as much as I like them, Google will do what Google will do. I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon!

UPDATE the next day: My reply to Google went like this:

Thanks for the information and clarification. But you are still saying that if we are wanting to purchase a plan for less than $1500 we will need to wait for online availability, correct?

and Google Rep Peter’s reply was:

You’ve got it exactly. We’re making the $1,500 option available for people who are already planning on paying that much, or need the service deployed either right away, yesterday, or as soon as possible.

If that doesn’t fit your needs, I would recommend sitting tight while we get the Google Message Discovery online purchasing process up. We don’t have a set timeline for it, but it’s going to be sooner rather than later.

This is mostly good news. They aren’t committing to a date, but it seems to be coming soon. When it does, you can bet we’ll be jumping on it like a frog on a lily pad!