I went for Mailbox.org, you get 25 GB for email AND 25 GB for documents, all for €4.50/month, about $60 per year. You also get calendar/contacts/tasks with web based apps for all of the above, plus word processor and spreadsheet. They support open standards (CardDav/CalDav/WebDav) so you can choose among several clients on any platform, and they seem to have a good track record with regards to privacy.
This, however, is offset by the fact that my "quality newspaper" subscription is about AUD $350/year, LOL
Disclaimer: I am not associated with Mailbox.org in any way, just a happy customer (at least for now!).
It's better than Office365 support though.
And had fewer issues in general with FastMail. Google Apps has some crazy limits, like on the number of IMAP connections or email aliases, you can't normally change the primary domain, you can't setup an abuse@ alias, etc, etc. and contacting Google Apps support doesn't do more than for them to tell what's already written in the docs.
And I mentioned in another mail, but FastMail's IMAP import and POP3 links work, whereas this functionality is broken for Gmail and Google's support won't help you ;-)
Problem is they couldn't help me much when I had problems. Google Apps has serious limits and contacting support won't help you get around those limits. Most of the time support just tells you what you can already find in their online docs.
They only solved two issues for me: (1) when I wanted to change my primary domain, after 2-3 months of asking them repeatedly, they finally enrolled me into this beta programming and finally changed my primary domain. And (2) when I upgraded to the annual subscription and then changed my mind, they reverted me to the flexible pricing. On the other hand they couldn't even help with with an import gone wrong.
With FastMail I have had a good experience thus far.
Were you on the grandfathered free tier? It seems to be quite trivial to change the primary domain if you're on a paid tier.
Unless customer service means something different than customer support. What does it mean?
Personally, I use Google Apps for Business and since a few months ago Hangouts doesn't work correctly any more. It's almost unusable at times.
What can I do? Who can I complain to? How can I escalate this? Absolutely nobody can help me.
Once I figure out a feasible transition plan from Hangouts, I'm done with doing business with Google.
The tech support rep who answered barely understood their platform and kept giving me incorrect instructions. It took a long while on the phone with that rep to get the account moved to a business account.
Almost all (old) providers let you set up a mail forwarding (to the new provider). But even better, several services let you set up some fetchmail-like program where it imports all the messages from the old provider, e.g. via POP3 or IMAP, and even deletes them with the old provider, if you want.
Nevertheless, I fully agree with you that email services are much too expensive. Given the current market prices, Fastmail, for example, is great and worth its money.
We're told to spend some money on good quality software and services.
But: If I (and even more so the average non-technical user) pay 99 USD/year for Dropbox, 50 USD/year for Fastmail (because you want your own domain), 10 USD/year for the actual domain (separately), 100 USD/year for my quality newspaper subscription, etc. -- and all this is just for one person in my famile (i.e. me) -- you soon end up not having enough money for the "real" things in life.