If you want to use your own domain it's $50. I'm disappointed that they stopped the $10/y plan, since I had a standing offer to give those away to friends and family in order to get them off of gmail/yahoo mail (I'd pay the first year and renewals would be up to the recipient). The current plans are a bit too expensive for that, and more than most non-cognoscenti would be willing to pay renewals for.

I was on a lifetime plan years ago, which to their credit they continued to honor even after they stopped offering it to new customers. I still woudl be, but needed some additional feature, maybe additional domains, can't recall, and now I'm on the $50/year plan. Still worth it to me.

yeah it'd be nice if they offered cheaper plans (possibly with less features)

They had that ($10/year, one address, fairly small storage limit) but they eliminated it a few years ago. That disappointed me.

The thing about most SaaS companies is a majority of your support calls come from your lowest tier customers. In a service like email where a huge number of problems are a mystery due to other mail servers possibly mishandling email Fastmail have probably added up the numbers and realised that dropping the cheapest plans results in significantly less support costs.