I have to disagree with this. Any email service that costs several dollars per mailbox per month is way too expensive for most people who tend to have more than a few email addresses, including shared ones. In many cases these may not be conducive to be trimmed down using aliases.
Take a look at Posteo.de, mailbox.org and Runbox.com. All of them are highly privacy focused, been around for several years, and also provide email for a low price. With prices of hardware going down, even those prices sometimes look high when you see the storage quotas, the low number of aliases (except Runbox), etc. (I concede that hardware is just one part of the solution, but see what Migadu.com says on that front).
Setting up a family of users even on Fastmail’s lowest tier (without own domain support) would soon become quite expensive, not to mention the standard plan.
When you ask them about it they will lie and tell you that it's not technically possible.
Most people have no idea what a MX record is and that other providers support own domains, so they fall for it.
Obviously they depend on customer retention by customer lockin.
I hate people who directly lie like that for their monetary benefit. So I would never go anywhere near them.
> We do not offer domain services because we do not save any personal data for any of our services. This is not possible with domains.
> Domains must be registered to a person’s name and address. As a provider, we would be required to store inventory data for all customers that use their own domains with us. As a result, we would have to provide this information to government agencies when requested.
> Additionally, security reasons also play a role in this decision. With customer domains, the owner of the domain is responsible for setting up security features like DNSSEC (and as a result also DANE). Even things such as SPF and other protocols for delivery would lie in the customer’s hand and could not be guaranteed by us.
> Because of these reasons we have decided not to offer domain services and instead to remain consistent with our focus on data economy.
See, that's just half-truths that amount to lies.
They claim they need to store personal information about you when you're using your personal domain.
That's untrue. Only if you registered the domain with them they would need to know about you.
It's also untrue, because unlike .de, many other TLDs don't require full names and addresses in WHOIS, or there are "privacy shield" services like the one nearlyfreespeech.net is operating.
Security reasons.
Also untrue (although it's a reasonable business decision that they don't want to handle customers calling their support with the customer's own domain set up problems).
I continue to claim that there is exactly one reason they are refusing: A customer with a *@posteo.de address will pretty much never leave.
I wouldn't mind very much if they admitted that, it's certainly a geeky niche to serve, but this security-and-privacy bullshit really makes me mad.
Do you want to trust your privacy with a company that's lying, even if you wanted to argue that it's a white lie?
Side note: Posteo does not allow own domains (you can only choose from the list of Posteo.* domains that the company owns). The reason for that is mentioned in their FAQ (in short, the company doesn’t want to have or store customer identifying information wherever possible).
Interesting - which products has this been an issue for? I'm on the same grandfathered GSuite deal and used to have this problem, but haven't in a while.
As others have said, your pricing is unpredictable and hard to compute. As I’m evaluating you with competitors, I’m not going to invest the time. In my experience, when a company makes it hard to know what you’re actually going to end up paying, you usually end up paying more than you want (see: Verizon).
From a business perspective, it seems to me your value proposition is that you are striving to be the cheapest email provider. I think you should consider the kind of customer this attracts. The sort of person who thinks a few dollars a month per email address is too expensive is going to be high maintenance. If you want this to be sustainable, I think you need a different angle. Consider that all these other email providers basically charge around the same amount. That isn’t an accident. I don’t know the email business, but I assume it needs a certain margin to actually be sustainable and these guys have landed in the right ballpark.
If you’re looking for business customers, then your pricing is basically rounding error compared to the other guys. It’s not materially different enough to matter for a business of any reasonable size to be worth having as a customer. In fact, the lack of predictability is a major deterrent. Businesses need to create budgets and every variable cost adds to the complexity of the forecast.