My FastMail account costs $50 / year or $130 / 3 years, thus with a monthly cost starting at 3.6 USD. That's less than the price of a Starbucks Grande Latte.

Google's G Suite, which is still better than free web mail since you no longer have the lock-in, plus a better privacy policy, is $5 per month, which is almost the price of a Starbucks Venti Latte. And this is actually an expensive offering in the business.

So no, it's not an expensive coffee, especially since we are talking about a highly skilled and highly paid demographic.

Also I'm from Romania where we have a lower cost of living and lower wages to go with it, so seeing my Silicon Valley brethren complaining about the price of paying for non-free email on your own domain is really awkward, given the importance of email.

I get it, I hate subscriptions for software too. But not when that service is essential for your profession, your security or your privacy and email is all of the above.

> That's less than the price of a Starbucks Grande Latte.

A cup of coffee is a pretty lousy indication of cost. For some people going into a Starbucks for a $5/€4,40/£3,92 gluten-free-unicorn-sprinkles-ariana-grande-latte may be part of a daily routine, but for others, coffee means using a coffee-maker to brew your own cup for a few cents, or just getting a cup to go at a some kiosk.

My point is that many of us drink such beverages every couple of days at least and in order to pay for your email address basically implies the same effort as buying a Starbucks Grande Latte.

And your email address is your online identity and has plenty of information in it that shouldn't leak, including your entire online purchasing history at least.

I am against paying for crap via subscriptions, I hate the subscriptions trend myself, but email in my opinion is fundamental to who we are and what we do online.

I think that's a pedantic detail that actually ignores the point being made. I've seen the "cheaper the the cost of a coffee per month!" type of phrasing used to commonly refer to Starbucks/etc

I almost never buy coffee out anywhere like Starbucks, but it was easy for me to understand in the context of his post

You can run your own email server via Vultr or DO for $5/month or less. You have to do some work to maintain it so there's the cost of time invested, so maybe two coffees/month. You can also opt for Fastmail or ProtonMail, or similar privacy-respecting email services, and again you're getting it for less than $5/month. I use Fastmail for my main email account and I love it.

I use Tiger Technologies (https://tigertech.net) for hosting mine and my wife's personal sites and email, they are all I need for basic Wordpress/email hosting and they have a superb support team. If I decide I want to get my hands dirty with running a server, I use Vultr.

G Suite for a domain and email is $5-6/mo. A cappuccino in SF I guess is a better analogy.

If you go for the annual plan it's $4.16.

Also the much better deal is the business edition, at $10 per month, which also gives you unlimited GDrive storage. Couple that with something like ArqBackup, Rclone, etc and it gets to be very cost effective, being cheaper than a Dropbox subscription.

Also the Terms of Service for G Suite is meant for businesses and thus much better.

Just be careful when buying apps and books from Google Play. If you don't want to be locked-in, don't purchase anything that can't be migrated.