[nullpilot]

I think there could be, sort of. I am currently using Migadu, which works great and I don't plan on leaving. Their selling point is that the amount of domains you add is not limited. It's affordable and reasonable, and a great option as indie dev with multiple projects. No fictional per-seat pricing that does not correlate with costs to the provider.

What I think is outside their target market, but what would be a great next step for projects with slightly more needs would be a Google Workspace/Outlook sort of service with a similar approach. Simple CRM features, shared contact management, calendars, signatures, etc. Roughly what Proton is doing without the Silicon Valley pricing, or maybe even Hubspot.

[Neil44]

I use Migadu, mostly for people who just want a couple of domain emails when we host their site. It works good for that and I like the accessibility of the logging. Needs a user-accessible out of office I don't want users emailing me to be their personal assistant. I did try to use it for transactional type emails, sending forms from Wordpress or scanners etc but it wasn't so good for that because the emails were too spammy and the accounts kept getting deactivated. autodiscover was a bit hit and miss, nobody likes talking people through imap servers over the phone, but it seems a bit better now.

[nullpilot]

Yup. Everything left and right of being an email inbox is a bit iffy, and that makes it feel a bit incomplete at times. Like I said, I like it a lot, and it provides a lot of value for the price I pay for it, but I wouldn't mind an option with just a slightly wider feature scope.

[looparing]

The big advantage with Google Workspace/Outlook is its accompanying products - calendar, word/spreadsheet processing, cloud storage, etc. Problem with starting only email service won't make the cut, but starting with email + other services make the project way more complex. Not forgetting answering the question "how each product (i.e. word processing, cloud drive, etc.) is better than Google/Outlook's?"

[nullpilot]

Yeah, you're right. Just a hosted inbox alone would be hard to differentiate in the market and I have no answer for that. For hosted email with auxiliary services there is room to carve out a market. At least that's where I see some value. As for being better: It really doesn't have to be. It just has to appeal to a different audience. I think non-VC funded SMBs that don't have Silicon Valley funds to spend on a dozen different per-seat products is a pretty big market.

What I am thinking doesn't have to compete with the whole Office or Google Docs suite, or HubSpot. There is imo enough value in being an economic all-in-one email solution for "the rest of us". Point DNS there, get email, CRM, maybe even a small transactional mail quota and some marketing email features.

I have two projects I would onboard yesterday if this existed, and I have spent more than a hot minute thinking about going for it myself, just to scratch my own itch. The main reason so far that I haven't is that Migadu + Resend is enough for my needs at this time, and I can do without CRM for now.