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.