The value you put on email is $10/year, so Fastmail doesn't represent good value. Other people obviously think its worth more. Fastmail are providing their service to those people.
Also, ten bucks a year has nothing to do with how much I'd personally be willing to pay for email. It is just my estimation of the amount you could charge people while still keeping healthy profit margins in this industry, however I don't have much domain knowledge regarding email and that figure could be very wrong. I'd love to hear from an expert.
This is only true for companies offering equivalent products, and that is never the case in tech because there are so many intangible factors.
In this case, one of Fastmail's intangible benefits is that they're not Google. Maybe Fastmail's customers think that's worth $50 ... but it has zero impact on Fastmail's costs.
Bzzt. Notice how everyone recommended fastmail and nobody else? It's not a highly competitive free market. It's "hi, can anyone recommend a MacBook cheaper than the one apple make" time.
Free markets reductionism not useful with no serious competitive pressure
Just because a particular provider is good and cheap and has a lot of satisfied customers doesn't make it any less of a free market.
As long as you don't want deliverability to Gmail or Outlook addresses. Though you can pay for Outlook deliverability it seems. They're very pinickety about allowing mail through from self-hosted or even low-traffic shared hosting IME [albeit limited].
There's no way to check before you build out the system, so unless you have an easy way to change IP and ISP then I'd be cautious.
By the way, I was asking for the point of view of an expert. If you are not an expert on email services, then I have no interest in hearing you speak condescendingly to me.
The first is e-mail.
The second is an extremely hard-to-validate promise of future work, such that (a) cutting-edge security and privacy protections are maintained; (b) properly designed regular backups and redundant infrastructure ensure your e-mails won't be lost; (c) staff ethics, training and oversight will protect against insider threats; (d) protection against spam and phishing will be effective - but will not block legitimate e-mails; (e) e-mails you send will get delivered and not marked as spam or silently discarded, even when sending to the likes of gmail; (f) no e-mails sent to you will be silently discarded or otherwise lost; (g) if issues do arise, that they will respond promptly and competently; and (h) as webmail technology advances and market conditions change, they will keep up-to-date and stay in business.
There's no way for me to validate most of these things. Instead, we rely on a supplier's "reputation" - an amalgamation of their past performance, their visibility and their marketing.
There are many e-mail providers. There aren't many e-mail providers widely known as reputable.
In other words, Fastmail doesn't face much price competition within the market of "e-mail services recommended by users of Hacker News" even if they do within the market of e-mail services generically.
The killer is five nines availability. That's pricey.
I used to run mailsystems and maintain mailsystems code in the 1980s. I don't do it now because it has too many moving parts. I got a grandfathered domain into hosted by Google and it's worth a damn sight more than the apparent market force bottom price.
Hardware or software or service your competitors have to be comparable or at least bearable to apply price pressure. I do not judge fastmail as price competitive because they (like apple) are competing in quality. Not price.
Google G Suite: $5, $10, and $25 per month per user.
Microsoft: $4, $8, or $12.50 per month per user.
ZOHO: $3, $7 per month per user billed yearly.
[0] https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html
[1] https://products.office.com/en-us/exchange/compare-microsoft...
Thinking though this for a project I'm working on with a tight budget I concluded for money related reasons I'd probably have to go with Google even though I'd prefer not to.
I use G Suite for my side business and while it seems like a great deal because you get all these other apps, in practice, I have never used them, not once.
We are heavy users of Google Sheets and Docs already so I know these will be used immediately.
FREE PLAN Up to five users. 5GB/User, 25MB attachment limit. Web access only. Email hosting for single domain.
So no, their pricing is not on par.
At $6 cost of hardware per account, now you have to factor in other costs and your profit margin. Support alone will bring you above $10. Marketing will also bring you above $10 on its own. At a decent scale, you can keep the marginal cost of engineering low (as it does not scale linearly), but on a mid-sized operation expect it to bring you above $10 on its own.
All in all, $50/year is high but not stratospheric.
https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/
If you have your own domain, you need to use the $50 or $90 plans.