My Services Pricing

I really love the My Services concept, but what is up with the pricing? I mean, I would really like to add .NET Alerts support over on the Dot Net Weblogs Archive, but yah right, MS is really blowing it here. Like I am going to dish out $10,000 to license passport and then $1,500 for the site and then another couple grand or so to use .NET alerts. Almost $15,000 just to send some friggin messages... I could write an app that sits in system tray and accomplishes the same thing without Passport in about 10 minutes, what is so special about the MS implementation that it requires $15,000 in licensing fees to do the same thing?

Anyone here actually planning on ever using any of the My Services?