If it were possible to profitably do what they do as well as they do, but at a lower price, someone would be doing it already.

It's $50/year for mails to an unlimited number of aliases on all my domains to go into a single mailbox. Hooking up new domains is easy, as is configuring them to absorb arbitrary aliases. All quite reasonable, as far as I'm concerned.

It only feels unlimited. It's actually limited to 600 aliases, which I think is good to avoid one account getting thousands and depleting the usable namespace for other users.

I disagree. Those prices are simply too high if you factor in the price of hw, hosting, sw, maintenance, etc. It simply doesn't add up.

The only reason they are not disrupted, I believe, is that most people are okay with free email, and businesses that want to be more secure keep their email inside their premises.

> Those prices are simply too high if you factor in the price of hw, hosting, sw, maintenance, etc.

FYI ~70-80% of our business costs are staff. We are the primary maintainers of Cyrus (https://cyrusimap.org/) the open source mail server we run. We develop our own webmail, which we believe is the best in the world. We do a lot of standards work: at the IETF we're heavily involved in both the EXTRA group (maintaining IMAP) and the JMAP group (new advanced sync protocol which we hope will in the future replace IMAP/CardDAV/CalDAV). We're also involved with CalConnect developing future calendaring standards, and are contributing to ARC development with M3AAWG and the IETF. Good engineers ain't cheap.

On top of that, we run our own machines, built to our own specifications to continually get faster performance (including putting indexes and recent mail on enterprise-grade SSDs) and more reliability (live replicas to secondary machines and data centres).

If you can do all that for $5/month, well, we welcome the competition and hope you too will work together for a more open, standards-based future.

I love that you interact with users here :)

Do you have any plans to add tags/labels in your web and app client? It's a very flexible feature that enable some (very) productivity increasing workflows for me.

Lets say that a mail tick in from the scouts, it's a bill for this years summer camp. With labels I would label it Invoice and Scouting. If I need to see all invoices for 2018 I will just search for that label and received in 2018. Same with mails relating to scouting. Without labels I can only save it in one folder, and searches are not guaranteed to catch everything unless I constantly make sure a search captures the mail every time I would set a label on it.

Thanks! There's a couple of us floating around here - but this article caught me during choir rehearsal, so Neil snuck in first :)

And I'll second the "it had better bloody be done this year!" - I'm keen to use it myself.

While promising future stuff is always dangerous, I’m pretty confident we will have something for you later this year.

I'm looking forward to it! It's the only thing I need to achieve an acceptable WAF, and finally get her to actually use it rather than keep using GMail.

Use of Tags/Labels on mobile/web is something that's keeping me on Gmail, or I'd be willing to look elsewhere.

An example of how GTD is possible through tags and labels: http://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-how-t...

The price seems reasonable to me. Bear in mind that they are much smaller than any popular free email provider because they charge.

Of the $50, my guess is that $15-20 covers the costs of hosting and support. That's a margin of 70% – could even be closer to 85% which wouldn't be uncommon for SaaS.

However, there are large fixed costs: an office, a development team, etc. Taking these into account, and the fact that Fastmail is a small business - they are never going to have the hyper growth of an ad-supported free model – I'd say this is a profitable, healthy business, charging reasonable amounts.

Could someone do hosted email for $40 for the same thing? Almost certainly. Could they charge $10 for something far less good (reliable, feature complete, less space, worse support, etc) yes – this is what hosting providers like GoDaddy do. Could someone do $10 for the same featureset, profitably? Almost certainly not.

Wow. I've just been poring over the Fastmail website, reading about all their features, and wondering what the catch is, i.e., the price seems astonishingly low for everything Fastmail offers. I'm totally signing up.

Your expectations are unrealistic.

I found it expensive as well in the past. Depending on your needs, you could look at Posteo.de and Fastmail.org. They're around half the price of Fastmail's lowest pricing tier, but have differences on number of aliases and a few other things. If you need a lot of aliases, Fastmail may be cheaper. Storage space, no ads, commitment to privacy are similar.

I meant to say Posteo.de and Mailbox.org and mistyped the latter above.

They offers lots of configuration and customization with that price. Maybe you mean somebody offer a simple, straightforward product with no customization at a lower price?

There's also mailbox.org

While their offerings differ in the details, by and large they offer the same thigns as fastmail.

Unfortunately they have stopped accepting credit cards. They now only take bitcoin and bank transfer (and cash by mail and some other non international stuff)

That's a bummer. I checked now and found that it does accept PayPal and a couple of other options (where it may be possible to use a credit card without having an account), but those come with additional privacy issues.