[nanoniano]

I meant their regular service. $5 per account is completely unreasonable, I don't understand where the money goes. (I talk about the $5 plan because it's the same as the $3 plan, but you can use your own domain, which doesn't really make it more complicated for them to give you service or anything)

[brongondwana]

Staff to run things well and develop new features, plus redundancy. We have roughly a 10/1 ratio of disk usage to quota by the time you count RAID overhead, local and offsite replica plus backups, and that includes really high end SSDs for indexes and recent emails.

Sure we could half-arse things and run cheaper, but that's not the business we're in. We provide a high quality product, and we truly believe we're worth it. No apologies for that price, it's quite reasonable for the value we provide.

[bachmeier]

I've had a lot of people ask me why I pay for email service (I use Fastmail). There are many free options available. Email is important to my work, and the free options are not at all what I'm looking for.

If you want to play the premium price game, you better be able to back it up with a good customer experience, and Fastmail does. That's why you see so many positive comments in any discussion of email.

[ams6110]

Fully agree. Fastmail is one of the very few "cloud" services I think is worth paying for (as an individual -- obviously businesses find value in e.g. AWS). I do the annual payment of $50 which effectively is two free months out of the year.

[hueving]

> it's quite reasonable for the value we provide.

The rest of your post is fine, but don't say this when pitching your product because value is entirely in the eye of the customer.

[brongondwana]

You're right - people who don't see that value won't be our customers, and I should have said "quite reasonable for the product that we provide" or similar instead.

We have made a conscious choice that we aren't going to chase after the really price sensitive customer.

We're OK with not having those customers. If price is your ONLY deciding factor, then FastMail isn't for you, because we'll never be the cheapest option. You can't compete with free if you don't have another funding source to subsidise the product.

And we don't: all our income comes from selling our service, so we can't compete on price alone. We have to compete on quality, features and execution.

I wound up moving this paragraph deep into the blog post because it wasn't the point of the post - but it is one of my key driving principles:

"Our goal is to solve your email needs as quickly as possible so you can get on with everything else in your life."

We don't want to keep our customers' eyeballs on our site longer than the minimum required to achieve their goals.

[tcfunk]

You'd be hard-pressed to find a VPS to rent and host your own email server for much less than $5/mo. And that's just an empty server! Now you've gotta set up the email software and hope to god people get your emails since they aren't coming from a reputable source.

[zimpenfish]

You can get a Scaleways machine for €2.99 a month which will handle a reasonable volume of email.

BUT. The ongoing faff and arsing about and maintenance isn't fun. If I didn't have many, many accounts for me and other people on my servers, I'd have migrated to FastMail a long time ago.

[tcfunk]

Never heard of Scaleway...those prices seem to beat the pants of DigitalOcean. Might have to look into that, thank you for mentioning.

[smacktoward]

(Disclaimer: anecdata follows)

The Mastodon instance I use is hosted at Scaleway. It's had multiple multi-day outages due to failures at Scaleway's end.

Cheap is great and all, but this experience has not been the kind that would lead me to recommend using Scaleway for any service you need to be reliable.

[ams6110]

They (Scaleway) are ARM machines, no?

[cknight]

Depends which offer you are looking at. They also have x86 VPS options using Atom chips.

[zimpenfish]

You can still run mail servers on them though. You might have to compile stuff up for yourself if your distro doesn't support it but I've found Arch to be pretty good in this respect.

[cyberpunk]

That's all fine, but then you're one hardware failure away from not being able to receive email.

I'm working on a guide on how to setup a replicated fault tolerant email cluster (galera/dsync) here [1] -- feedback appreciated.

This costs far more than something like fastmail, however. Depending on your situation you might value cost over peace of mind.

1: https://medium.com/@cyberpunk_networks/nsa-proof-your-email-...

[castis]

I gladly pay them $5 a month because hosting my own email server sucked and I'd much rather pay someone else who does it well.

[systems]

unreasonable compared to who? or to what?

the comparable offer from google is also $5

[lettergram]

As a paying user, I find it's more than reasonable. Although, I do wish they'd seperate their calendar portion to another app - their email service is superb for the price. Else, I'd have to pay $5 / month minimum, to host my own -_-