AWeber Review - What the Numbers Say and Who Should Use It

The Short Version for People Who Are Busy

AWeber works. It has worked since 1998. Whether it works well enough for what you need, at the price they are now charging, is the only question worth answering.

The platform is best for beginners, bloggers, and affiliate marketers who want email marketing that does not require a technical background. Deep automation, behavior-based triggers, and modern segmentation logic will cost you extra or are simply not available.

There was also a significant pricing change. Long-time customers on grandfathered plans saw rates jump 50% to 150% overnight. That news spread fast and it matters if you are planning to use AWeber for the long term.

This review covers everything - pricing, deliverability data, feature gaps, who it is right for, and who should look elsewhere.

What AWeber Is

AWeber is one of the oldest email marketing platforms still in active development. Founded in 1998 by Tom Kulzer in Chalfont, Pennsylvania, Kulzer is credited with inventing the email autoresponder after noticing sales prospects slipping through the cracks at a hardware company. That origin story still shapes what the tool does best - autoresponders and simple sequences.

The platform has grown to serve over 1 million customers across 182 countries and remains fully bootstrapped with no outside funding, employing roughly 99 people.

Tom Kulzer founded AWeber back in 1998, and the platform still maintains a loyal following of over 100,000 small businesses and entrepreneurs worldwide.

AWeber is built for people who want to send newsletters and automated email sequences without managing complex technical infrastructure. Founded by Tom Kulzer in Chalfont, Pennsylvania, the company's focus hasn't shifted much: AWeber is built for people who want to send newsletters and automated email sequences without managing complex technical infrastructure.

That is both its strength and its limitation.

AWeber Pricing - What You Pay

AWeber has four plan tiers: Free, Lite, Plus, and Done For You. Here is what each one costs and what you get.

Free Plan

The free plan lets you manage up to 500 subscribers and send 3,000 emails per month. Unlike many limited free tiers, AWeber Free includes full email design tools, automations, sign-up forms, landing pages, and integrations. Even better, you still get 24/7 support via phone, email, or chat, which is rare for a free plan.

The catch is that it lacks more advanced features such as split testing, behavioral automation, and the ability to remove AWeber branding. Free plan emails show AWeber's logo in your campaigns. For anyone building a professional brand, that is a deal-breaker.

Lite Plan

The Lite plan starts from $15 per month for up to 500 subscribers, but restricts you to just 1 email list, 1 custom segment, 3 automations, and 3 landing pages.

Those limits bite harder than they look. If you are running any kind of segmented marketing - say, separating buyers from free subscribers - one custom segment is not enough. You will need to upgrade to Plus to do anything meaningful with segmentation.

The Lite plan gives you one email list, three landing pages, three automations, and up to three team members. It covers the basics for most new senders but carries a 1.0% transaction fee on ecommerce sales and excludes behavioral automation and advanced reporting.

Plus Plan

The Plus plan starts at $30 per month for up to 500 subscribers, and upgrades you to unlimited automations, landing pages, and lists/segments.

The Plus plan is AWeber's most popular option - it unlocks unlimited lists, landing pages, automations, and segments, along with advanced sales tracking to monitor performance. You also get webpage and email sales tracking and the ability to remove AWeber branding, two major upgrades for professional email marketing campaigns.

Scaling costs rise quickly though. At 10,000 subscribers, you are looking at $100 per month on Lite or $135 per month on Plus with monthly billing. That is considerably more than some comparable alternatives at the same subscriber volume.

Done For You Plan

AWeber's Done For You plan replaces the previously listed Unlimited tier. Rather than offering higher subscriber limits, it brings in AWeber's team to configure your account within seven days - covering your email template, landing pages, signup form, and an initial automation sequence, with 30 days of edits included after delivery.

This is AWeber's answer to the intimidation factor of setup. If you want someone to build your system for you, it exists. But once those 30 days of edits close, you manage it yourself.

The December Price Hike - What Happened

This is the part no AWeber review should skip over. AWeber shocked users by eliminating all grandfathered pricing and raising rates by 50 to 150% across the board - a move that forced even loyal, long-term customers onto the new, higher pricing tiers.

The December price increase of 50 to 150% hit long-time customers hard, with some reporting deleted lists and billing disputes on Trustpilot, where AWeber scores just 3.0 out of 5 from 129 reviews.

One long-term user summed up the community reaction on a review platform: "The recent platform updates have severely impacted digital entrepreneurs and affiliate marketers. The implementation of new sending limits combined with significant price increases shows a clear disconnect from their loyal customer base." That user migrated to Moosend.

A fairer take came from another user: "Even though it was the first major increase in a very, very long time, still, anytime you have to rework your budget to keep the tools you have used as much as AWeber, it is a hassle. But, without the increase in cost, how can we, as customers, expect AWeber to keep up with technology?"

The price increase was large, abrupt, and painful for long-term users. It also put AWeber closer to competitors who have been adding features for years. Whether that trade-off is worth it depends on what you use the platform for.

The Hidden Billing Problem

Even at current prices, there is a billing mechanic that catches people off guard. AWeber counts unsubscribed contacts as part of your list - billable contacts - if they are still in your account. To avoid additional costs, you need to delete them regularly.

Having to manually keep on top of your unsubscribes to avoid being bumped up to more expensive plans is not something busy business owners should be expected to do.

If you are not cleaning your list actively, you will pay for people who opted out months ago. Set a monthly reminder to purge unsubscribes or your bill will creep up without any growth in your active audience.

AWeber Deliverability Numbers

Deliverability is the most important metric for any email platform. An email that goes to spam is worthless, no matter how well it is written.

AWeber's deliverability to Outlook and Yahoo is strong. Gmail is a different story.

The Good: Outlook, Yahoo, and AOL

AWeber's deliverability rates to Outlook at 93.85% and Hotmail at 90% in the latest round were outstanding.

AWeber's deliverability rate shines when it comes to Yahoo and AOL. The platform's performance is consistently stellar. Since 2017, deliverability rates to both providers have remained high, with multiple testing rounds achieving 100%.

If your audience is older or uses Microsoft and Yahoo email products - common for B2B contacts and older demographics - AWeber is a strong performer.

The Problem: Gmail

The latest EmailTooltester round showed that AWeber's email delivery rate to Gmail Primary Inbox was 81%. The score is pretty poor and is the second lowest out of the 15 platforms tested. Compared to the previous test, there's a significant 14% drop in performance.

Separately, EmailDeliverabilityReport found that 81.08% of 539,698 emails sent with AWeber ended up in the recipient's main mailbox, with 15.79% of all emails moved to the spam folder after successful delivery.

The Gmail problem matters because Gmail has the largest market share of any email client. If your audience skews younger or is tech-savvy, you will likely be sending a significant portion of your list to Gmail inboxes. An 81% Gmail primary inbox rate means roughly 1 in 5 emails is not landing where it should.

The Inconsistency Problem

In January 2023, AWeber demonstrated a 92% deliverability rate, improving to 93.2% by June 2023. For the last three rounds, they averaged 89.4% deliverability, earning "excellent deliverability" status. But their performance is pretty inconsistent.

The five-round average drops to 82.44%, indicating a poor deliverability score overall.

The swing from 93% to 81% in a single testing cycle is notable. It suggests that deliverability is not a constant you can rely on - it depends on what AWeber's shared infrastructure looks like at any given time, and on how well you maintain your own list hygiene.

What AWeber Does Right on Deliverability Infrastructure

When you combine the tenure of the team members dedicated exclusively to email delivery at AWeber, you get over 51 years of deliverability management and expertise.

AWeber owns the full delivery stack. Many other and newer services outsource their email delivery to third parties.

AWeber enforces and supports proper email authentication, including SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. All messages sent through AWeber are authenticated automatically, and users are encouraged to set up custom DKIM and DMARC for optimal deliverability and compliance.

Owning your own infrastructure means AWeber can remove bad senders faster. When a spammer gets kicked off a shared platform, the shared IP pool gets cleaner and your deliverability improves. That is a structural advantage other platforms that rely on third-party sending infrastructure cannot offer.

AWeber's Features - What Works and What Doesn't

The Email Builder and Templates

The drag-and-drop email builder offers over 700 email templates and HTML designs that resize automatically based on your subscribers' devices.

The template count is large, but quality matters more than quantity. While the template library is enormous, many designs look dated compared to the polished, modern options from Campaign Monitor or GetResponse.

The saving grace is the Smart Designer. AWeber's Smart Designer analyzes your website or social media account for logos, imagery, and colors, and then automatically builds a gallery of ready-to-use, custom email templates for your business. This is a genuine time-saver for anyone without design skills - you enter your URL and get a branded template in seconds, not hours.

AWeber's editor includes content blocks for images, buttons, coupons, RSS feeds, and products. A built-in Canva integration lets you design custom graphics without leaving the platform, saving you from switching between multiple tools.

The AI Writing Tools

AWeber's AI toolset has grown significantly. New features worth highlighting include the AI Subject Line Assistant, the AI Writing Assistant, the Newsletter Assistant, AWeber's Smart Designer tool, and a new Facebook Lead Ads integration.

The built-in AI writing assistant generates email drafts, adjusts tone, checks grammar, and brainstorms ideas. AWeber claims it helps write emails 75% faster.

The reality from hands-on testers is a bit more measured. While the AI writing assistant helps in crafting subject lines optimized for open rates, the body copy often requires a "human-in-the-loop." The output can sometimes feel generic or overly sales-focused, requiring editorial refinement to match a specific brand voice. It is a powerful tool for drafting, but not a set-it-and-forget-it solution.

AWeber's new AI Subject Line Assistant is one of the more practical recent additions. It generates suggestions based on your actual email content rather than a generic prompt, so the output tends to be relevant.

Automation - The Biggest Weakness

Automation is where AWeber draws the most criticism, and it is deserved.

The Lite plan caps you at just 3 automations, and even the Plus plan lacks the visual workflow builders and behavioral triggers found in GetResponse or Brevo.

Your automations need to branch. The Workflow builder handles basic trigger-based sequences well but doesn't support the complex conditional logic you'd get from tools like ActiveCampaign or Brevo.

Unlike other competitors, you can't build sophisticated automation journeys. You only get a few basic triggers and actions.

You can set up a welcome sequence, a nurture drip, and trigger emails based on someone joining a list or clicking a link. What you cannot do is build a branching journey that sends one email if someone clicked and a different email if they did not - at least not without workarounds.

The features AWeber does offer are heavy on practicality and ease of use, without much of a learning curve. First, the autoresponder - a time-based email sequence - has been built upon for over two decades. Creating an auto-response campaign in AWeber is quick and easy. However, in full transparency - it's nothing fancy.

AWeber has 17 premade email workflows and a marketplace where you can access email sequences of brands like Shopify and Thinkific. For most beginners, these premade workflows cover the core scenarios. The limitation becomes clear only when you want to go beyond those scenarios.

Segmentation

The main disadvantage is the way it restricts segment creation to higher-level plans. For example, the Lite plan only allows you to create 1 custom segment, which won't get you very far at all.

Segmentation relies on manual tagging rather than the dynamic behavioral targeting that more advanced platforms provide automatically.

Manual tagging is workable, but it is slower and easier to let slip than automatic behavioral segmentation. If you are running a list where subscriber behavior drives your messaging - as it should - you will feel this limitation early.

On the other hand, AWeber makes managing contacts straightforward. You can easily segment based on subscriber behavior, tag contacts, and remove inactive users. You can set up a rule that unsubscribes someone from a particular list after leaving another, or adds a tag based on list signup, email opens, or link clicks.

Landing Pages

With AWeber, you can design landing pages to get more signups or sell your products. You also get loads of templates for various use cases, making it easy to get started.

The builder is functional and does not require coding knowledge. Users especially like the fact that they can create good-looking landing pages without coding knowledge.

The limitations: AWeber's main drawbacks include a lack of built-in A/B testing for landing pages. If you want to test which landing page version performs better, you will need to do that manually by tracking traffic to each URL separately.

Reporting and Analytics

Reporting is very limited overall. For emails, you can get names of openers and clickers and web visits, but there's no way to filter out bot clicks or inflated Apple Mail Privacy opens, and you can't build custom reports. Ecommerce, sales, and attribution reporting aren't available unless you're on a paid plan, and while basic campaign statistics come as standard, deeper insights like automation and form reports are also paywalled.

Bot click filtering is missing. With Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflating open rates across the industry, platforms that cannot help you identify real engagement versus bot activity leave you making decisions on noisy data.

That said, AWeber does well on the basics. Among major email platforms, AWeber stands out with detailed graphs and charts for every type of report - from clicks over time to monthly subscriber growth - making it easy to know what is going on at a glance.

Customer Support - Genuinely Excellent

Every AWeber review across every platform agrees on one thing: the support is exceptional.

AWeber offers 24/7 customer support via phone, live chat, and email on every plan including the free one. That is almost unheard of in this price range.

The live chat team are quick to respond, usually within an hour. It's also one of the few platforms offering 24/7 support, and the responses you get are genuinely helpful rather than scripted. Overall, it's a very reliable support experience.

AWeber won Stevie Awards for Customer Service four consecutive years from 2016 to 2019.

For anyone who has dealt with Mailchimp's notoriously slow support or paid platforms that hide phone support behind enterprise plans, this is a significant differentiator. Getting a real human on the phone without having to upgrade your plan is rare in this industry.

Affiliate Marketing - A Unique Policy Advantage

This is a feature most AWeber reviews cover too briefly. It matters a lot to a specific type of user.

AWeber maintains one of the most permissive affiliate-friendly policies among mainstream platforms and has long been a default choice for bloggers and creator-based affiliates. Its terms of service treat affiliate links as a normal business activity rather than a tolerated exception.

AWeber is one of the few major email marketing platforms that explicitly permits affiliate marketing content. This makes it a popular choice among bloggers, content creators, and affiliate marketers who have faced restrictions or account bans on other platforms like Mailchimp.

Mailchimp is the most widely documented platform that restricts affiliate marketing in its terms of service. Affiliate marketers who include affiliate links in campaigns on Mailchimp risk account suspension without advance notice.

If your email business model includes promoting affiliate products - which is the case for a huge number of bloggers, newsletter operators, and content creators - AWeber's explicit permissiveness on this saves you money. Getting your account suspended mid-campaign on a stricter platform is a nightmare scenario that AWeber largely eliminates.

Integrations

AWeber connects with 750+ third-party applications.

You can use it seamlessly with platforms such as Cyfe, Launch Effect, Drupal, WordPress, Raven, Unbounce, Magento, and many more.

It falls short when your needs go beyond email, with no SMS, limited sales attribution, and ecommerce integrations that depend on third-party apps.

The third-party integration list is wide. Native integrations are thinner than platforms like ActiveCampaign or Klaviyo, which have direct, deep connections with ecommerce platforms. If you run a Shopify store and want behavior-driven emails triggered by cart abandonment or purchase history, you will be relying on Zapier or a workaround. The connection works - it just adds an extra step.

AWeber vs. The Competition

No AWeber review is complete without an honest comparison. Here is where AWeber stands relative to the platforms people most often compare it to.

AWeber vs. Kit (formerly ConvertKit)

The behavioral tagging features are what set ConvertKit apart from services like AWeber.

Many email marketing tools like AWeber and Mailchimp are list-centric, meaning that you'll eventually have many different lists within your account as you grow - and some subscribers could be members of multiple different lists, which can at times cause confusion and even duplicate email deliveries.

Kit uses a subscriber-centric model with tags instead. That architecture is more flexible as your list grows. If you are a blogger or content creator who plans to build a serious, segmented audience, Kit's model ages better than AWeber's list-based approach.

Both AWeber and ConvertKit have a free plan, but the latter offers unlimited landing pages compared to just one from AWeber. ConvertKit's Free Plan also offers unlimited forms, unlimited broadcasts, and audience tagging and segmentation.

Kit's free plan is significantly more generous. AWeber's free plan is better suited to absolute beginners who are not yet running complex campaigns.

AWeber vs. Mailchimp

Mailchimp and AWeber are the two oldest names in email marketing for small businesses. AWeber wins on support; Mailchimp wins on design.

AWeber wins on support - Mailchimp's free plan offers no phone or live chat support, only documentation. AWeber wins on affiliate marketing policy. AWeber has historically had better deliverability with older-demographic email providers like Yahoo and Outlook.

Mailchimp wins on design - its template designs feel more modern. MailerLite's automation builder is more accessible for beginners, and the template designs feel more current than AWeber's.

For pure beginners, AWeber's support advantage is often the deciding factor. When something breaks and you do not know why, being able to call a human being at 2 a.m. on a Sunday is genuinely valuable.

AWeber vs. ActiveCampaign

This is not a close comparison on features. ActiveCampaign's automation engine is in a different league. The Workflow builder handles basic trigger-based sequences well but doesn't support the complex conditional logic you'd get from tools like ActiveCampaign or Brevo.

If automation depth matters to you - behavioral triggers, lead scoring, multi-path journeys, CRM integration - ActiveCampaign is the better tool. It costs more, and ActiveCampaign's automation capabilities are in a different class.

AWeber wins on simplicity and support. ActiveCampaign has a steeper learning curve and its support, while good, is not as responsive across all plans as AWeber's.

AWeber vs. MailerLite

Many competitors like MailerLite or Mailchimp offer a much more generous free plan, making AWeber's paid plans much less attractive. AWeber is generally quite expensive, and you can get even more features for cheaper with other companies.

MailerLite is the strongest competitor at the price-conscious end of the market. It has a free plan that supports up to 1,000 subscribers, more modern templates, and a comparable automation builder at a lower price point. If price is your primary concern, MailerLite is harder to argue against.

AWeber wins on support quality, affiliate marketing policy, and its owned delivery infrastructure. MailerLite wins on price-to-feature ratio at smaller list sizes.

Who AWeber Is Right For

Be direct here: AWeber suits a specific type of user. Here is who it genuinely suits.

Bloggers and affiliate marketers. AWeber is one of the few major email platforms that explicitly allows affiliate marketing, making it a go-to choice for bloggers who rely on affiliate revenue. If your list monetizes through affiliate links and you are tired of walking on eggshells with platform terms of service, you can market freely without worrying about account termination.

First-time email marketers. Capterra reviewers rate AWeber 4.4 out of 5 for ease of use. The drag-and-drop builder, premade workflows, and Smart Designer mean you can send a professional-looking email in under an hour without any design or coding experience. The 24/7 phone support means you have backup when you get confused.

Small businesses that value phone support. AWeber offers 24/7 customer support via phone, live chat, and email on every plan including the free one. Competitors at this price point rarely offer phone support at all. For operators who are not technical and want a real person to talk to, this matters enormously.

Newsletter publishers with stable, moderately-sized lists. AWeber gives you newsletters, autoresponders, and landing pages with built-in payments. If that's what you need, it works, and it works well. The RSS-to-email feature that automatically emails new blog posts or podcast episodes to subscribers is reliable and easy to configure.

Users who want to get started fast. AWeber's onboarding is beginner-friendly, and the platform backs it up with tutorials, live webinars, and a certified expert network for users who want guided support at every stage.

Who AWeber Is Not Right For

Anyone who needs deep automation. AWeber's main drawbacks are its limited automation capabilities, lack of built-in A/B testing for landing pages, and expensive pricing to get the full functionality. Advanced marketers may find its features restrictive compared to alternatives like Moosend or MailerLite. If you need conditional branching, behavioral scoring, or complex multi-path sequences, look at ActiveCampaign or Drip instead.

Ecommerce stores with complex customer journeys. The platform's automation capabilities are limited, lacking essential ecommerce flows like cart abandonment and customer re-engagement, which can hinder revenue generation. Platforms like Klaviyo or Omnisend are built specifically for ecommerce behavior data. AWeber can connect to Shopify via Zapier, but the integration is shallow.

Cost-sensitive operators scaling past 5,000 subscribers. At 10,000 subscribers, you are paying $100 to $135 per month depending on your plan. If you are growing beyond 5,000 subscribers and need sophisticated automation, shop around before committing to a paid AWeber plan. MailerLite, Brevo, and Moosend all offer competitive pricing at higher list volumes.

Anyone who needs SMS or multi-channel marketing. AWeber falls short when your needs go beyond email, with no SMS, limited sales attribution, and ecommerce integrations that depend on third-party apps. Brevo, Omnisend, and Klaviyo all offer SMS alongside email from within the same platform.

The Deliverability Problem That Most Reviews Miss

AWeber's deliverability score depends heavily on what you are sending and to whom.

The delivery of emails through AWeber in the categories Food and Drink, Home and Garden, Clothing, and Pets resulted in the best delivery rates. In contrast, the worst delivery rates were achieved for categories including Dating, Finance, Health, Job and Career, and Sport and Fitness.

If you are sending finance newsletters, health supplements, or career advice emails - categories that are inherently flagged more aggressively by spam filters - AWeber's deliverability will look worse than the headline numbers suggest. Finance and health content triggers spam filter scrutiny at the inbox provider level, not just at the ESP level. AWeber's infrastructure is solid, but it cannot override the content scoring that ISPs apply.

If you are in a high-scrutiny category, your list hygiene, authentication setup, and content quality matter even more. AWeber handles authentication automatically with DKIM and DMARC, which helps. But you still need to actively manage your list, remove inactive subscribers, and avoid spam trigger phrases in your subject lines.

What AWeber Has Improved Recently

I keep seeing AWeber treated as a static product in reviews. It is not. Several meaningful updates have shipped in the past year.

Since TechRadar last reviewed the platform in 2023, AWeber has made several notable updates. The AI toolset has expanded considerably, with an AI Subject Line Assistant now included on all paid plans and a standalone AI Writing Assistant for drafting full email copy. The company also renamed its automation builder from Campaigns to Workflows in mid- and added a direct Facebook Lead Ads integration that pulls new leads into your AWeber list automatically.

AWeber stands out with its massive template library, AI-powered writing tools, AMP email support, and an innovative MCP integration for managing campaigns through ChatGPT and Claude. The MCP integration is genuinely novel - it lets you manage email campaigns via conversational AI tools, which reduces the amount of time you spend inside the dashboard itself.

The automation builder rename from Campaigns to Workflows is more than cosmetic - the underlying logic has been updated to support more visual workflow building. ActiveCampaign is still more powerful, but AWeber has closed some of the distance.

The List Hygiene Problem (And How to Fix It)

There is an operational issue with AWeber that most users do not catch until it costs them money. Because unsubscribed contacts still count as billable unless you delete them, your costs can grow without any real list growth.

Here is the fix: set a recurring monthly calendar reminder to go into your AWeber account, filter for unsubscribed contacts, and delete them in bulk. AWeber does have tools to do this - it just is not automated. The platform does automatically remove hard bounces, which is good. The unsubscribes require manual intervention.

The same principle applies to inactive subscribers. People who have not opened an email in 90 to 180 days are hurting your deliverability score over time. I have seen it repeatedly - after a list cleaning the list shrinks, but open rates go up and sender reputation with inbox providers improves.

If you want to grow your list in the first place - before you have AWeber deliverability problems to worry about - building a targeted prospect list is the starting point. Try ScraperCity free to search millions of B2B contacts by title, industry, location, and company size, then import the verified emails directly into your AWeber account.

AWeber's Rating on Major Review Platforms

Here is where AWeber stands across the major review aggregators:

• G2: 4.2 out of 5 from 640+ reviews.
• Capterra: 4.4 out of 5 from 321 reviews.
• Capterra - Value for Money: 4.36 out of 5.
• Trustpilot: 3.0 out of 5 from 129 reviews - pulled down significantly by the December price hike backlash.
• EmailDeliverabilityReport deliverability score: 91 out of 100.

The split between Trustpilot (3.0) and Capterra (4.4) tells the story clearly. Long-term, engaged users who chose AWeber for their actual use case tend to rate it well. Users who were pushed onto higher pricing tiers without warning left angry reviews. Both groups are right - about different aspects of the same platform.

The Honest Verdict

AWeber is a solid email marketing platform that is best at one specific thing: reliable, simple email marketing for beginners, bloggers, and affiliate marketers who want a tool that works without requiring technical expertise.

It is not the best option if you need sophisticated automation, and its current pricing is harder to justify against MailerLite or Brevo at larger list sizes.

The December price hike was badly handled. Eliminating grandfathered pricing and raising rates by up to 150% overnight is aggressive. Loyal customers absorbed that cost with no warning.

What remains true is that AWeber's infrastructure is genuine, its customer support is excellent, its affiliate marketing policy is explicitly permissive, and its deliverability - while inconsistent across providers - performs well outside of Gmail.

If you are a blogger, affiliate marketer, or small business owner who wants to get email marketing running without spending weeks learning a new tool, AWeber is a reasonable choice. Start on the free plan, test it, and upgrade only when you need the additional features.

If you are running an ecommerce store, need advanced automation, or are cost-sensitive at list sizes over 5,000 subscribers, compare MailerLite, Brevo, or Kit before committing.

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