This is a clear case of a price being judged differently depending on where you live. 25$ is luxurious expensive meal out for me or 5-7 fast food meals.

It's also expensive compared to rolling my own. Using the standard plan, I'd be paying 200$/y for just a single address for each of my family members. Personally, I want at least 2 myself. Compare that to the ~120$/y I pay for my main VPS which has plenty of spare resources to handle not only my family's email, but also for some clients AND, since I make the rules, I also don't need services like Sendgrid for sending email from my websites. All well worth the 5-10 afternoons a year spent maintaining it.

That is really great if you don't have any outbound deliverability issues due to IP reputation on a VPS host! Under those circumstances, that sounds like a great arrangement.

I think that is not quite the norm, lots of these hosts (and home internet connections) tend to have rather bad reputations, and chasing down the various RBLs can get really old really fast, especially since the most common response is to silently blackhole so you don't get a bounce.

This might be what you mean, but I believe they charge by inboxes, not by addresses. I have lots of addresses, but a single inbox (which I use rules to file within), and that is relatively cheap.

I used to run my own email server, but found it difficult to get things like push email working reliably, and had a couple of issues with deliverability of emails.

I might be wrong, but I also think it is expensive. When I can have a 5 family plan from office365, including, word, excel, powerpoint, outlook, etc, with 1TB per account, 60 minutes of skype calls per account, etc, for 10 per month, 25 per month (for 5 people) only for email seems too expensive to me. The only thing lacking is custom email address.

Premium outlook allows you to use a custom domain now. So long as it's registered with GoDaddy.

I would never register any domain I care about with GoDaddy. I did it once, but their spammy dark pattern practices really turned me off.

looks very interesting, I might try to switch

Some time ago, Fastmail had a basic plan at like 10$/year for 250mb of storage and 1 alias. No Contact/Calandar sync, tho.

I thought that was a pretty good plan for most people. Unfortunately, they dropped this plan and the cheapest option is now 30$/year.

It's £25 a year or £2 a month.

The standard plan is $5 per user per month, so for 5 users that's $25/mo.

The basic is $3 though. I have migrated all my private emails I've ever sent or received (some tens of thousands, starting from 90s) to Fastmail. Still well under the 2GB limit of the basic plan.

FastMail appears to be $50/year if you want your own domain. --Maybe there's a discount for multi-year signups, but I can't find it in their pricing details.

Honestly, at that price point I would go with Exchange Online for $48/year. --Virtually the same price and yet I would get double the storage and native integration to Outlook on the desktop and mobile.

It's expensive if you think of what it costs to keep a mail server online. They have a price that clearly shows to me that they have no competition.

There is competition. It’s just that many people don’t know or haven’t tried them. Here are three providers on par with Fastmail but are way cheaper if you need multiple mailboxes — Posteo (posteo.de), Mailbox (mailbox.org) and Runbox (runbox.com).

But I do believe that even these cheaper ones are expensive for what they provide in terms of storage capacity, number of aliases, etc. Costs are supposed to go down over time, and prices too.

also mailfence (fr), disroot (nl)

There's also development and maintenance costs? Someone needs to build that web UI, android and iOS apps, kick those servers when they misbehave, answer the phone or reply to your enquiry?

Except for the apps, cloud hosting providers already give you all of that for a better price. I also don't want an app... IMAP is a standard, you know.

IMAP is an evolving standard still! We've had a handful of new RFCs extending IMAP just this year.

(your FastMail subscription also goes towards paying for work on improving the standards and developing open source software to support them)

It's cool you spend your time and money doing things you like (regardless of whether those RFCs will be implemented by email servers and clients) but don't make your customers pay for it. Set up donations or something.

What do you get for less than $35 per year? A cheap VPS? Are there plans for less than $3 per month these days?

mailbox.org and posteo.de are both 1€ per month. I haven't used either though.

I use Posteo and would highly recommend it. There may be occasional hiccups, but those seem to be few and far between.

This 1-XS server costs 2€ every month and it could perfectly handle the email of hundreds of users. They are charging you more only for yourself, and that's not even factoring in the economies of scale.

https://www.scaleway.com/virtual-cloud-servers/#anchor_start...

Fastmail has employees that have to be paid. You're paying that money instead of the time required to maintain your own email server.

I understand that, but paying 100x what a VPS would cost, that's a rip-off. (100x because a VPS can handle the email of 100 people or even more.)

But what does the price of a VPS have to do with anything? I doubt hosting would be their biggest cost.

Why shouldn't hosting be their biggest cost?

Well, think about the VPS you're proposing. Two euros a month is 24€ a year. Even if you're only paying yourself 6€ an hour, I'm skeptical that running an email server for 100 people would require less than four hours per year.

Fastmail can get quite expensive when you need more than a few mailboxes (not aliases, but mailboxes). Cheaper options are Posteo, Mailbox.org and Runbox.