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by brongondwana 3198 days ago
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.
3 comments
bachmeier 3197 days ago
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.

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ams6110 3197 days ago
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.
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hueving 3197 days ago
> 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.

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brongondwana 3197 days ago
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.

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