Why do I now need to pay an annual membership fee?

While TPN is operated on a not-for-profit basis, it needs to be able to cover its (not insignificant) operational and technology costs. Under our original financial model, these costs were primarily recovered via a 20% administrative fee that TPN applied to each TPN assessment. We changed this policy for two reasons. First, we made the decision that all companies who benefit from the standardized and centralized information made available by TPN should contribute to the program, including Content Owners. Second, as we added Application/Cloud to TPN assessments, the cost of assessments increased significantly, and it was no longer fair or sensible to charge a 20% fee on assessments that could cost as much as $70k. To address these points, we moved to an annual membership fee based on annual gross revenue for Service Providers and TPN+ functionality and roadmap participation for Content Owners.