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.
I don't feel like FastMail is that expensive for most people.
Obviously, compared to free, it's expensive. But in real terms, I pay $70 every 2 years for it - works out about £25 a year for me, which is about the price of a meal out. I think that's worth it for secure and powerful email. I've never found it to be expensive.
This is a clear case of a price being judged differently depending on where you live. 25$ is luxurious expensive meal out for me or 5-7 fast food meals.
It'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.
That 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.
This 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.
I 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.
The basic is $3 though. I have migrated all my private emails I've ever sent or received (some tens of thousands, starting from 90s) to Fastmail. Still well under the 2GB limit of the basic plan.
FastMail 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.
There 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.
There'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?
Except 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.
It'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.
This 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.
Well, 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.
Fastmail can get quite expensive when you need more than a few mailboxes (not aliases, but mailboxes). Cheaper options are Posteo, Mailbox.org and Runbox.
but the problem is that fastmail only offers mail and calendar, while gsuite offers, word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, online forms, and photos...
Fastmail 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.
It 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.
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.
