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Yah, I totally agree. As I said, I’m willing to pay. I’ll even pay $100 a year. Shoot, $150 if you want to include some cloud storage I won’t touch because I ha
by filmgirlcw 4y ago
Yah, I totally agree. As I said, I’m willing to pay. I’ll even pay $100 a year. Shoot, $150 if you want to include some cloud storage I won’t touch because I hate how Google Drive works. But $25-$30 a month, is just obscene for this sort of thing. Because I’m not a business. I’m an individual who would like my own domain name, the same way I’ve been using my own domain names since I was 14 years old.
If in 2007 or 2008, Google had positioned this as a business product (and they didn’t. It was literally called Google Apps For Your Domain, promoted as a free service, and people were told to sign up their families or use it for their websites to get all the benefits of Gmail (which was and remains free) but on your own domain), that would be one thing. If in 2012 when they made it a legacy service, they’d told us, you can continue to pay but it’ll be “$X per domain and you won’t get any of these extra business features,” that would have been fine.
If in February or March or whenever this was announced, they had said, “if you want to convert this to a personal Gmail account that has aliasing setup” or you want to again, pay per domain (not per account) and not get certain Workspace features and zero support, that would have been fine.
Instead, we were told a bunch of conflicting things, we were encouraged to upgrade to accounts we didn’t need or to migrate to other providers, or those of us procrastinators (me) held out some hope we’d get a solution like we got. And I’m genuinely thankful for that decision.
But I still agree that there is a market — maybe not a huge one, but a market, for hosted email on a custom domain aimed at individuals and families that doesn’t charge per address.
I’m sure you would risk cannibalizing some business sales for people who would want to be cheap and claim to be a family, but businesses too cheap to pay for email accounts usually just use regular gmail accounts anyway. And with the right restrictions (on number of accounts and of message volume sent), I think you could still have a profitable endeavor. At least I’d like to think so.
Alas.
- riffic 4y ago> But I still agree that there is a market — maybe not a huge one, but a market, for hosted email on a custom domain aimed at individuals and families that doesn’t charge per address. Migadu, MXroute, or one other which is a YC company that I fail to remember the name of (ImprovMX I think?). Cloudflare is doing forwarding too now.
- filmgirlcw 4y agoI have an Mxroute account. And I like them a lot. Very good people. But it’s a small scrappy operation that I don’t put in the same tier as a Fastmail or a Gmail. For its price, it doesn’t really need to be, but I’ve also had downtime (totally understandable), and it didn’t solve the ancillary problems of any accounts I’ve created with those Google Apps for Your Domain SAML/SSO. Which Google claims would/could still work, but would still require a lot of auditing on my part that I’m frankly happy to avoid. Cloudflare’s email forwarding was also a consideration. I prefer having separate actual inboxes, but I could create new gmail or Outlook accounts to forward to. I may use that for a new family homelab project, where my husband doesn’t want to monitor a new inbox.