@Craig - I'm making money but it's nothing to get excited about. It helps pay for hosting and such and as of yet, I'm not going to be paying monthly for Akismet despite how great of a service it is.

@James Poling - I'll have to continue to enjoy it for free until pressured to do otherwise :)

@Chip Bennett - I get what your saying with your first point but if you're trying to monetize a service, is this not the route you would go? Out of the gate, you know people will want to use the free version over all others and that option is still there, along with the other plans, it's just not as big and important as the first three plans. I'd be pretty upset though if the free plan was hidden or off on some other page.

Agreed with point 2. The amount should have been 0 for default.

As for point three, I understand where you're coming from and I bet the guilt trip has convinced at least one person to up the anty just to see a smilier face. Personally, I think it would have been cool to see the donation slider as a separate plan where people could select their price point, minus the smily face. I have reason to believe and perhaps I'm wrong but Akismet saves so much time for so many people and does such a good job at thwarting spam that I bet many people would take advantage of that plan. It might even be the most popular one. Even if it were 3 dollars per month, from a business perspective, that would be better than Free.

@Peter Knight - I think the only time you'll see a decline in Akismet installations is when the plugin is not bundled with the core of WordPress or the service has a meltdown and the algorithm gets screwed up.

@Brad Vincent - There is definitely an argument to be made that if first time users have to go through such a process that perhaps not bundling it with core is a good idea. Alas, I think Akismet will be unbundled either in 3.2 or sometime in the future, perhaps after it may be added to the Jetpack plugin bundle.

@Christoph - Well, this site gets 50-60 thousand pageviews a month and I'm not paying a dime. As for privacy concerns, I'm out of the loop but as far as I know, no jurisdiction from Germany has taken Automattic to court over it and the service has been around for a few years now. In fact, I've never heard of an individual blogger being taken to court because of their use of Akismet on their site. I'd think someone out there would have sued already if it was really that big of a problem.

I won't argue that there are other anti spam measures available to everyone to use but Akismet has been rock solid for me and in fact, since 2009 when this site was launched, Akismet has a %99.35 accuracy rating. Over the course of two years, only 28 false positives leaving me with more time to get things done instead of moderating.