That's $50/year for each user. Easy to stomach if it's only yourself, but add even a partner (not to mention a small team with a bootstrapped product) and it starts to make less sense financially.

Sorry, but even for a team of 6 people if you can't muster $300/yr (breaking down to $25/mo or $4/user-mo) you aren't bootstrapping. You're being inefficient, and perhaps even reckless with your endeavor. (Unless you're building a competitor).

Sometimes it's about the pennies. But other times, especially early, it won't be these types chunks of money that kill you. I used to go on CL and do user-studies for $50 a pop and resell the gift cards for cash or amazon credit. So it's hard for me to believe that what you are building can't spare an hour of work to fund baseline communication systems that are pretty well supported.

Better pay those $300 and have your people and you 100% focus on your product, creating it, marketing it and selling it. Than dealing with spam rules or downtime servers.

That is why heroku exists right? Otherwise only linode or ec2 could make business. Now if you have free time (you shouldn't) then, it is a whole different story. I agree with you.

Most people pay more than $50 (or even $100 or $200) a year for far less useful services than a managed collaboration suite with full support.

To put it in perspective, Netflix costs ~$108 a year. People have no issues spending $4 a day on a latte, but just 13 lattes costs more than a year of Google Apps. A single latte or a big mac meal at mcdonalds costs more than an entire month of google apps for you.

I always hate these comparisons because they have no basis in reality. Food, drugs, and sex are basic human drives. You can't compare them to something as ephemeral as email.

That's not true. Communication(what email is for) is a basic need. Consider how much you spend on your mobile phone every year.

The mobile phone is a better comparison, but you're dealing in abstract concepts now, not the simple neurochemicals your brain has spent millions of years evolving to crave. Plus, email is probably one of the least satisfying forms of communication.

> Food, drugs, and sex are basic human drives.

And then there's coffee, which exceeds them all :)

Coffee is a drug, combined with a tasty delivery mechanism that registers as food to the reptilian brain.

For that matter, so is beer!

This. I've been looking for a good email solution for personal+freelance work with decent privacy, security, and reliability. I don't need 24/7 support. I am absolutely willing to pay for it. But pricing per mailbox with Google apps adds up really quickly even with just 4-5 boxes. I'd like to be able to make separate mailboxes for my partner and to separate several different classes of email (personal, business, limited access, catch all, etc) for security purposes. These things don't need extra support or space, I can't stomach an extra $50/year for what amounts to aliases with passwords.

Has anyone found a good solution for this? I could host it myself but that is a lot of hassle, free email accounts have ads and rarely let you use your own domain. The best I've found so far is email through a shared hosting provider, but it has limitations of its own (no IPv6, no 2 factor auth, self signed TLS certificates, etc). The cost is similar to a Google Apps account but without the linear price increase per mailbox.

I believe that you can accomplish what you need using domain aliases (which google apps for business makes use of). You can have up to 20 domain aliases that all point to one mailbox: http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1...

Have you considered using aliases in GApps? Different than the catch all, but allows you to setup specific email addresses. I use them for accounts, newsletters, etc and then create filters and labels in my one apps email.

$50 "feels" like a lot because it's been given away free all this time. But our industry has spoiled us. We can hop from one free product to the next free product, but really we just need to determine if that one product is valuable enough to justify paying for it.

In the case of email, it's obviously valuable. While there are other options out there, ultimately you have to determine the cost of researching, testing, setting up, and switching over you and your employees. All this time is spent away from your money making activities.

If you can't afford 0.15 % worth of overhead, using very conservative numbers, you need to rethink your business model. To break out that tired old analogy again - you're spending more than that on coffee for each of them, when you make it yourself and don't even factor in the depreciation of the coffee machine.

Really? How much is your time worth?