If a product is subsidized by a company's other products, it's hard for me to believe it'll be around forever. For an email product, that's a huge problem, because I use my address in hundreds of contexts that take a long time to identify and migrate, much longer than a typical company's sunsetting notice.
EDIT: The parent comment was edited to note that they perceive DDG Email as part of the core product, not a separate product. That's helpful to know, but I'm still skeptical that that's sustainable in the long term. This would not be the first time a feature was cut from a product because it was too expensive to maintain. I'll be waiting to see their unified privacy solution really take off before I place any bets on this feature.
Just because you're a product doesn't mean the service is not sustainable. It should be very easy for them to figure out whether the feature is profitable or not compared to other acquisition methods.
You have "email protection" but do you have nice stuff like sandbox detonation and private intel partnerships with companies like Proofpoint? That as a premium might be worth charging. Heck, even public yara rule scanning and allowing inbox owners to set things like DMARC enforcement and custom rules and actions would be a nice premium.
Fastmail’s email servers are in the US and the company is in Australia. Both are in the five eyes jurisdictions, plus Australia has some draconian laws (see Assistance and Access Bill, though email itself is generally not a secure enough channel). ProtonMail is in Switzerland, which is better surveillance-wise, but it still complies (as one would expect a company to) with court orders and has disclosed the IP address of an activist due to a court order.
Fastmail supports IMAP, which means you can use any email client on a desktop or phone. ProtonMail does not support IMAP directly on desktops and requires a “bridge application” for IMAP. This is provided for paying customers. ProtonMail does not have any support for IMAP on smartphones, where you’re either left to using the browser or using the ProtonMail app.
While one may marginally improve some aspects of the service and has strategic value, the other actually moves the needle in terms of an end-user's overall privacy.
But presumably DDG has contractual agreements with Microsoft so “no longer has an index” is a hypothetical that isn’t really grounded in reality or something that would be likely to happen without warning.
And if Bing is no longer viable at some point for some reason, that would be a good reason to change the priority of building an index.
But clearly DDG feels secure enough in their current agreement, and as of now, we have no reason to believe otherwise.
Our product vision is an "easy button" for privacy, an all-in-one privacy app. Email protection is part of that, along with search, browsing, etc. Put another way, we see email protection as part of our core product, and within our app we autofill duck addresses in email forms.
We will take your comment into consideration, though we prefer free services where possible so more people can get privacy protection, which is in line with our mission. This service comes with it a set of privacy guarantees here: https://duckduckgo.com/email/privacy-guarantees and we will not be putting ads on it.