I'm always on the lookout for email providers who protect privacy and are cheap. I have three suggestions for you.
Firstly, as others have stated, your pricing is way too complicated for anyone to understand and figure out how much they would be charged. It would be better to make some assumptions and go with pricing based on account, aliases, storage, etc. Your current pricing is almost like one of those cloud service pricing calculators. Very nice in theory for paying based on usage, but practically next to impossible to make any sort of cost estimates on.
Secondly, your privacy policy is very short and doesn't give a lot of comfort. Take a look at Posteo.de to see how privacy is handled. It's one of the best that I know of.
Thanks for the suggestions! I'll look at the privacy policy again and see how I can make it more clear that we're not abusing users' trust.
I did look at mailbox.org. It's about double for their lowest monthly plan, which is reasonable.
Where I hope Purelymail will shine is that it scales a lot more naturally (once you hit mailbox.org's 2 GB cap, you upgrade to a plan that's 2.5x more expensive), it enables use cases that'd get you frowny faces from other providers (because we charge appropriately), and there's no surcharge for things that don't actually cost more.
Want a dozen usernames? Sure, whatever. Need a hundred users? Sure. Store 2 TB of mail for some reason? We've got you covered.
The downside, as you point out, is that the pricing gets a bit scary and I need to work on making it feel safer.
I'd recommend Posteo [1] and Mailbox [2] to people mainly for the costs. They're cheap and are a lot more flexible in pricing as your needs grow.
Fastmail becomes terribly expensive once you realize you need multiple accounts (not just aliases) for different people in the family. At least for me, paying a few hundred dollars on Fastmail (or anywhere else) for email is really way too expensive. I've also written to Fastmail asking for flexible pricing options, but they responded that they're not even considering any changes on pricing/flexibility for the near future.
Edit: If one doesn't need custom domains and office suites, I'd recommend only Posteo! That company is way ahead of others in being better for all humans (read on their website about all the things they do).
Privateemail works pretty well, 10€/y and I think it's like 3€ or 4€ per each extra email address.
As mail client I use thunderbird and K9.
I very much appreciate my privacy, so I would always use things that I can understand how they are making revenue without selling my data.
Fastmail is quite expensive for people who need several mailboxes (not aliases). For anyone with that kind of a need, the cheapest options I've found for emails are Migadu and mxroute. Both support unlimited domains and mailboxes for a reasonably low fixed price. Go check the prices and compare with Fastmail. You'd be surprised!
Migadu doesn't charge for storage space, but its pricing is based on the number of outgoing mails. Mxroute has tiers based on storage space.
Migadu has a free tier that you can use forever if you have minimal outgoing email requirements. It's also a good way to check its admin interface. Mxroute has no free tiers or free trials. There's no way to know how it is without paying and signing up.
Migadu is based out of Switzerland, with its servers in France (a Nine Eyes country). Mxroute is based out of the U.S. (a Five Eyes country).
Neither of these two providers come close to Posteo, Mailbox.org or Mailfence on their privacy statements or stance.
Same price for 2GB + Custom Domain + 3 sending Aliases + Catchall + Contacts and Calender Sync + Web Client + hosting in Germany for the old Mailbox.org plan is still the better offfering for me privately as I regularily clean up my Mail + like having calender and contacts integrated.
But 10€/ month for unlimited storage and users is definitely a good offer, too.
https://mailbox.org
I pay 1 euro per month. With calendar, contacts, file storage and DAV. With aliases and your own domain. Plus it's a well-known company.
I'd like to consider migrating from my self-hosted solution but it seems like all major email providers want $ per month per user|mailbox. Are there any providers out there that charge a reasonable fixed amount for say 50 mailboxes?
I'd focus on who would get value out of your features. Figure out what your top 1-2 features are, and think of who needs extra privacy. People in the government, in purchasing? Senators?
I think your pricing is way off unless you can find a super niche segment who are crying out for your product. People don't like to spend $50 per year on an email, much less per month.
Let me ask you this: what kind of person would need to securely share access to your email? Probably someone in charge. Work from there.
I hope you figure it out. It seems a little bit to me like you're trying to reinvent email and charge a premium for it, which is a tough product to sell.
In Germany, especially since Snowden, there is a healthy niche for paid mail providers, such as posteo.de or mailbox.org. I pay 1€ per month for my mailbox because it allows me to be certain that I'm the customer, not the product.
Hi there. Thanks for the feedback, it's much appreciated! :)
The price is per mailbox, so that's 10GB/mailbox for £19 per month. We also offer a licence and download for Outlook 2010 with each mailbox. OWA and ActiveSync are provided as standard, so maybe we need to make that more clear. Setup is also free and instantaneous. We're hoping to bring the price down per mailbox at some point in the future depending on initial uptake.
I see a bunch of options, and a few people complaining for many that they're too expensive.
I wish I could bold this, but:
For a paid mailbox on professionally-managed systems that are likely to be able to stay around, expect to pay around $5/month probably annualized.
Fastmail Pro? $5. Office 365 Business Basic (Exchange/OneDrive)? $5. KolabNow? $4.50-5. Protonmail? €5-8. Heck, GSuite? Starts at $5. Most of the other paid options in here? Almost certainly in that same range, or there are noticeable drawbacks (e.g. no custom domains on Posteo). Hosting your own on a Digital Ocean droplet or other comparable small VM? Probably going to average out to around the same, plus your time administering.
It's probably possible to do this for less, particularly if you consider your time spent on dealing with any issues to be free of cost. For the rest of us, it seems that $5/month plus or minus a dollar or so is likely the consensus price out there and nobody's really managed to compete for less than that.
GMail does it free because for the vast majority of users people stay signed in so Google has a verified signed in user for ad targeting across Google's properties including their ad networks, and this likely includes on Android if someone clicks a link from the GMail app and opens in the default browser - boom, cookies set and linked to that identity.
It doesn't seem like the most affordable. They allow a lot of users, but just charge you for the rate of sending and receiving. I think something like fastmail would be cheaper for me as I'm more focused on the quantity of email and storage and not the total number of users.
* Mailbox.org has a per mailbox price that starts at EUR 1 per month
* Runbox has similar options
* Mailfence is another one, but I have no idea how easy it is to use for setting up the custom domain and mailboxes (last I checked quite sometime ago, the setup involved contacting them)
* Migadu has an "all you can eat" pricing that starts at USD 48 per year, with restrictions placed on how many emails you can send per day. For those who don't use email accounts to send a lot of mails, I don't think there's anything that can beat Migadu on price.
All the above providers are based out of Europe. All of them provide direct IMAP support (unlike ProtonMail where you have to use a bridge application).
For those who don't mind US based hosting, Mxroute is another provider that's slightly similar to Migadu on the hosting several mailboxes for a fixed price.
Makes sense, I saw the security assessment stuff for Gmail which I suppose I'll have to contend with as well, haha. I'll take another look into EmailEngine then. How do you charge, per connected user (and how much, generally)? Is it a monthly usage based subscription if so?
Edit, I just took a look at your FAQ and saw the price was 695 Euros a month. It is strange to not put this pricing on a prominent pricing tab I believe, rather than making me click a link in the FAQ to figure it out. Any reason why it's set up like that?
Firstly, as others have stated, your pricing is way too complicated for anyone to understand and figure out how much they would be charged. It would be better to make some assumptions and go with pricing based on account, aliases, storage, etc. Your current pricing is almost like one of those cloud service pricing calculators. Very nice in theory for paying based on usage, but practically next to impossible to make any sort of cost estimates on.
Secondly, your privacy policy is very short and doesn't give a lot of comfort. Take a look at Posteo.de to see how privacy is handled. It's one of the best that I know of.
On pricing, also compare with mailbox.org.
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