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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

There are two reasons I'm still with Google for mail at this point: Inertia, and cost. The former is pretty easy to understand. The latter has more to do with the fact that I have a private domain for our family and I've been using Google Apps since the days when it was free. If I want to convert to another service like ProtonMail then I'm either going to tell a bunch of people in my family to pay up (with all the accompanying annoyances), or I pay $50+/year on their behalf out of my own pocket. And in either case I probably get to move their email for them. It's hard to get up the enthusiasm to do any of that, even if I do have a growing desire to disconnect from Google.

I haven't done any thorough searching recently, but if I could find a reputable provider that had a reasonable family-priced solution that would be ideal. The per-account pricing adds up relatively quickly.

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Just as someone who has done a decent amount of research on what would be the best/cheapest way to host my family email... I found that runbox.com had the best deal. You pay more for a base/master account w/ a custom domain ($35/yr and up) then you pay a lesser amount for sub-accounts ($8/yr and up). It quickly overtakes the 2-3/mon/account rates that the other providers cost.

I was in a similar situation and I moved everything to Runbox https://Runbox.com, the business and social model are amazing and running on green energy

I'm pretty speechless. $50/year is twenty seven point oh two (27.02) cups of startbucks small coffee a year for a family.

Do people truly think that's expensive for email hosting?! Honestly, no wonder Facebook and Google keep trampling with the so called "rights" of people successfully by peddling "free stuff" -- even those in tech paid six figure salaries think fifty dollars for essential communication for a year for multiple people is expensive.

I think they may have been saying $50 (the lowest paid tier) per user per year is too expensive.

However, the $75 paid tier "Professional" has multi-user support. I think you could probably use just that to run accounts for your family, if you desired.

Fine, even fifty per year per person for an essential service is $4.16 per month which is two cups of small starbucks drip coffee ( + taxes ) per month per person.

If this is too much for essential communication tool which does not sell your information to others in the view of HN-reading, tech-working, six-figure-salary-having tech elite then we have a value problem.

The problem is it's not actually a problem unless you consciously remind yourself it is. Put bluntly, me using gmail has 0 negative impact on my everyday life.

What does have negative impact on my life is

1) paying for stuff (always, no matter how wealthy you are) 2) specially when it is less convenient 3) and has worse user experience (hard to beat gmail here) 4) while also having to invest time in educating yourself about alternatives and setting it up 5) and actually migrating to it, spreading the new email address, transferring data, learning all the ins and outs of the webmailer (if you use it)

Solve for some of these, do it really well and you have built something that people will be happy to use.

We have a practical demonstration that email hosting for $50/year per person is "too expensive" for people who make 6 figure salaries per year while working in tech and needing email. There's no real market here.

ProtonMail and FastMail and other paid for competitors are picking up the long tail.

> 1) paying for stuff (always, no matter how wealthy you are)

and until this changes as the mindset one can be assured that he or she would be monetized via selling and influencing his or hers behavior information. After all, someone needs to make money to pay the six figure salaries to people who keep Gmail running and we are unwilling to be charged for it.

For the whole domain it would basically amount to a new iPhone every year. A pittance, I agree, you make a valid point.

> Facebook and Google keep trampling with the so called "rights" of people successfully by peddling "free stuff"

I don't think you get this correctly.

Many people use Gmail is because it's stable and came with Google Account, so they sign up conveniently.

Plus, not many people still using email as their main day to day communication method these days. After all, there are many specialized tools out there to pick (For example, some people may use Slack for work, and Facebook for friends etc).

So, I think it's not because $50/year is expensive, rather, it's because many people don't care anymore.

The person to whom I replied said it was $50 that mattered to him. That's the person who spends time on HN, is in tech and I'm guessing well paid.

I'm going to also make an educated guess that someone who meets the "Spends time on HN, is in tech and is well paid" is likely to be someone who is concerned about "privacy" as well as leaks of PI.

How can I possibly reconcile those positions with $50 per person per year is too expensive?

50+/year? That is a big plus indeed, I also want my family on Protonmail. I donated btc in the beginning and got on board immediately, now that the bridge software is out, regular people can use their MacOS mail and their Thunderbird so the service is really attractive. But... on my own domain with 2 kids and a wife and a father it is 25 euros per month or 240 per year. I email about once every couple of days, as does my wife. Kids do even less... Now I have 3 mail users for 3 euro/month at transip.com. The price difference is pretty big. A family package would be really welcome. Before you ask, be aware that the "Addresses" of the Plus account are not users, they are aliases.

Edit: I still think protonmail is absolutely great, it works well, it looks very nice. I'd love to pay and probably would switch just for me, however, it's pretty hard to route one address of a domain to one server and the other to another.

How about Zoho? Their free offering comes with support for custom domains and something like 20 accounts.

As a bonus, you can choose between Zoho.com and Zoho.eu. Both offer the same services, but Zoho.eu is hosted in Europe ender the protection if the various privacy and data protection laws.

I looked into this recently. The free plan doesn't include custom domains anymore. If you had an account before they removed it, you still have it on the free plan.

Thanks, I will take a look. At first blush it seems like things have changed and the free offering isn't what it used to be -- 5 accounts not 20, and as someone else mentioned, perhaps no custom domain.

But it's worth looking into, because at first glance their lowest paid option fits my general requirements and is only $36/year/user, which is less than ProtonMail.

Yes, it's a few bucks cheaper, but for me Protonmail has that security focus that I worry Zoho don't have. Zoho also provide many other spaid services and that makes me worry about what they have to focus on. Exciting features vs boring security.

Assuming you're talking about 10 users, 50/usd/year/head does seem a bit steep. It's what you'd pay fastmail or user for a custom domain.

I'm a bit surprised fastmail doesn't appear to have a group account that's at least a little cheaper.

You can get less (in way of email service) for much less from something like:

https://www.hetzner.com/webhosting/level-1

That's less than 30/year for 100 accounts, custom domain, imap/pop/smtp (just 5gb storage shared though).

Now, I'm happy with hetzner as a dedicated hw host - but there's a bit of a bad neighbour effect - and you obviously get less for 30/year than for 500/year...

But seems strange that fastmail doesn't have something in between for family accounts. Maybe they do if you shoot them a mail?

Check out https://connect.yandex.com

I seriously doubt that a Russian-hosted option is going to be of interest to anyone outside of Russia.

If you are concerned about TLA agencies having access to your data, Russian servers look like a very good choice.

Umm, concerned about TLA agencies, you say; then how about FSB?

the usual argument is that typical citizens have more to fear from their own intelligence agencies than from foreign ones outside their country's sphere of influence.

then again, it is probably futile for a normal person to even include TLAs in their threat model.

I think the Russian-hosted option also should not be considered by anyone inside Russia other that Russian government.

Check out https://KGB.com

[irony]

Surprised, but someone use this domain for "independent provider of enhanced information services" :)

I'm curious what you'd think a reasonable price point would be. For context, I'm currently trying to set up a paid email hosting company because $50 a year seemed a bit ridiculous to me, and it seemed like it could be done a lot cheaper.

I'm a bit of a cheapskate, so I think a couple hundred a year for the family would be acceptable. That includes my parents, brothers, nephews, nieces -- I give out accounts under our domain to any blood relative with the same last name. Not a huge number, but it's like ~16 accounts. Only four or five that get any substantial traffic, but the rest are still perfectly valid individual accounts. At about $55/year/account for ProtonMail (if I looked in the right place; prices were in Euros), it pushes a thousand bucks a year. For email, that's simply more than I want to pay. I'd go back to hosting it myself on a Digital Ocean droplet before I'd spend that much on it. But ... I don't yearn to be in charge of security and tech support again ;-)

is there any particular reason why your whole family needs to be on a private domain? most people i know outside the tech field couldn't care less what domain is on the end of their email address, as long as they don't have to change it.

Proton is good, Tutanota is good, but my personal favorite is Fastmail, especially for family members who don’t need or want the security bells and whistles, but also don’t want Google snooping on them.

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