Ka-Blam Digital Printing (www.ka-blam.com) has eliminated setup fees on all of its products and services.

From this point on customers who submit their print jobs to us in accord and compliance with our technical specifications will pay only for printing and shipping/handling. Setup fees are a thing of the past.  If a customer's submitted print job does not conform to our technical specifications we'll send that customer an email detailing the nonconformities and how they can rectify the problems. The customer can then fix the problems and resubmit the files or they can authorize us to bring the files into compliance for them via our new Pre-Press Service.

So why eliminate setup fees? We believed when we launched Ka-Blam (and still believe now) that the setup fee is a legitimate charge. It takes time and resources to queue a job for print and it takes additional time and resources to archive print jobs and keep them backed up for future re-orders. We could've factored these expenses into our printing rates, but that would've caused customers making larger orders to pay a disproportionately higher charge for setup and archiving than customers placing smaller orders. We decided at the time that the most fair solution was to apply a flat rate setup fee.

So why now? As time has gone by and we've refined our procedures and processes the time and resources required for setup and archiving has decreased significantly. However, the amount of free pre-press work we were doing on jobs submitted in non-compliance to our technical specs has remained steady from the time we launched. You see, we allowed ourselves to fall into the trap of expediancy -- "just fixing problems" of a pre-press nature ourselves at our own expense rather than putting the onus back on customer to submit print ready files. We decided to take a "two birds one stone" approach ... eliminate setup fees altogether without any increase in our printing prices while also eliminating free pre-press work. This is a real win-win. Our customers are saved the costs of setup and with our staff having to do less pre-press work we're able to devote more time to printing and to promoting the titles we print at our sister site IndyPlanet!