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FastMail is good, but it's very expensive. I'm waiting for more competition in this space. I think, as people turn away from Google (and thus Gmail), more compe
by nadont8 8y ago
FastMail is good, but it's very expensive. I'm waiting for more competition in this space. I think, as people turn away from Google (and thus Gmail), more competition will arise and we'll finally see fair prices.
- danpalmer 8y agoI don't feel like FastMail is that expensive for most people. Obviously, compared to free, it's expensive. But in real terms, I pay $70 every 2 years for it - works out about £25 a year for me, which is about the price of a meal out. I think that's worth it for secure and powerful email. I've never found it to be expensive.
- nadont8 8y agoIt's expensive if you think of what it costs to keep a mail server online. They have a price that clearly shows to me that they have no competition.
- glandium 8y agoWhat do you get for less than $35 per year? A cheap VPS? Are there plans for less than $3 per month these days?
- nadont8 8y agoThis 1-XS server costs 2€ every month and it could perfectly handle the email of hundreds of users. They are charging you more only for yourself, and that's not even factoring in the economies of scale. https://www.scaleway.com/virtual-cloud-servers/#anchor_starter https://www.scaleway.com/virtual-cloud-servers/#anchor_start...
- wtetzner 8y agoFastmail has employees that have to be paid. You're paying that money instead of the time required to maintain your own email server.
- nadont8 8y agoI understand that, but paying 100x what a VPS would cost, that's a rip-off. (100x because a VPS can handle the email of 100 people or even more.)
- wtetzner 8y agoBut what does the price of a VPS have to do with anything? I doubt hosting would be their biggest cost.
- nadont8 8y agoWhy shouldn't hosting be their biggest cost?
- actuallyalys 8y agoWell, think about the VPS you're proposing. Two euros a month is 24€ a year. Even if you're only paying yourself 6€ an hour, I'm skeptical that running an email server for 100 people would require less than four hours per year.
- bennofs 8y agomailbox.org and posteo.de are both 1€ per month. I haven't used either though.
- newscracker 8y agoI use Posteo and would highly recommend it. There may be occasional hiccups, but those seem to be few and far between.
- morcmarc 8y agoThere's also development and maintenance costs? Someone needs to build that web UI, android and iOS apps, kick those servers when they misbehave, answer the phone or reply to your enquiry?
- nadont8 8y agoExcept for the apps, cloud hosting providers already give you all of that for a better price. I also don't want an app... IMAP is a standard, you know.
- brongondwana 8y agoIMAP is an evolving standard still! We've had a handful of new RFCs extending IMAP just this year. (your FastMail subscription also goes towards paying for work on improving the standards and developing open source software to support them)
- nadont8 8y agoIt's cool you spend your time and money doing things you like (regardless of whether those RFCs will be implemented by email servers and clients) but don't make your customers pay for it. Set up donations or something.
- newscracker 8y agoThere is competition. It’s just that many people don’t know or haven’t tried them. Here are three providers on par with Fastmail but are way cheaper if you need multiple mailboxes — Posteo (posteo.de), Mailbox (mailbox.org) and Runbox (runbox.com). But I do believe that even these cheaper ones are expensive for what they provide in terms of storage capacity, number of aliases, etc. Costs are supposed to go down over time, and prices too.
- senorjazz 8y agoalso mailfence (fr), disroot (nl)
- HeadsUpHigh 8y agoThis is a clear case of a price being judged differently depending on where you live. 25$ is luxurious expensive meal out for me or 5-7 fast food meals.
- TsomArp 8y agoI might be wrong, but I also think it is expensive. When I can have a 5 family plan from office365, including, word, excel, powerpoint, outlook, etc, with 1TB per account, 60 minutes of skype calls per account, etc, for 10 per month, 25 per month (for 5 people) only for email seems too expensive to me. The only thing lacking is custom email address.
- barrongineer 8y agoPremium outlook allows you to use a custom domain now. So long as it's registered with GoDaddy.
- wffurr 8y agoIt's £25 a year or £2 a month.
- deleted 8y ago
- tallanvor 8y agoFastMail appears to be $50/year if you want your own domain. --Maybe there's a discount for multi-year signups, but I can't find it in their pricing details. Honestly, at that price point I would go with Exchange Online for $48/year. --Virtually the same price and yet I would get double the storage and native integration to Outlook on the desktop and mobile.
- franga2000 8y agoIt's also expensive compared to rolling my own. Using the standard plan, I'd be paying 200$/y for just a single address for each of my family members. Personally, I want at least 2 myself. Compare that to the ~120$/y I pay for my main VPS which has plenty of spare resources to handle not only my family's email, but also for some clients AND, since I make the rules, I also don't need services like Sendgrid for sending email from my websites. All well worth the 5-10 afternoons a year spent maintaining it.
- cflee 8y agoThat is really great if you don't have any outbound deliverability issues due to IP reputation on a VPS host! Under those circumstances, that sounds like a great arrangement. I think that is not quite the norm, lots of these hosts (and home internet connections) tend to have rather bad reputations, and chasing down the various RBLs can get really old really fast, especially since the most common response is to silently blackhole so you don't get a bounce.
- danpalmer 8y agoThis might be what you mean, but I believe they charge by inboxes, not by addresses. I have lots of addresses, but a single inbox (which I use rules to file within), and that is relatively cheap. I used to run my own email server, but found it difficult to get things like push email working reliably, and had a couple of issues with deliverability of emails.
- newscracker 8y agoFastmail can get quite expensive when you need more than a few mailboxes (not aliases, but mailboxes). Cheaper options are Posteo, Mailbox.org and Runbox.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pmorici 8y agoFastmail is on par or cheaper than Google's equivalent G Suite email service to business.
- TsomArp 8y agobut the problem is that fastmail only offers mail and calendar, while gsuite offers, word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, online forms, and photos...
- pmorici 8y agoFastmail has a photos/files/website feature so it isn't just email. I use G suite now for my side business and I've never used any of the features besides email since I have Office on my machine.
- TsomArp 8y agoIt obviously depends on your use case, your personal situation, etc. But for me it is very hard to justify $5 per user per month (we are 5 so that is $25), when I can pay $10 to Microsoft for Office 365 for 5 users, and get, besides email, chat, and drive, word, excel, powerpoint, and skype with 60 mins of international calls.
- bensonn 8y agoZOHO! FREE PLAN - Up to five users. 5GB/User, 25MB attachment limit. This is to have all 5 users in one "organization". ZOHO offers full G-suite replacement, free. They have many more applications too. I used the free plan for a few years, then started paying $24 per year for more storage. What you get for $24 per year is amazing. What you get with the free plan is amazing. Their business model is to impress you with their products enough for you move to a paying plan. They do NOT make money harvesting your personal information and selling it third-parties.
- beagle3 8y agoDo note that the free plan is web only these days (no pop/imap) which is a showstopper for many.