Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

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For $50, FastMail gives you 25 Gb. That would cost $14 on your service. But they do not charge for sending/receive emails (which I think is stupid).

So we are looking at 14 + 4 +1 = $19 before you even send/receive emails.

I just did a quick look and it looks like I receive around 6000-7000 email a year. Most of it is advertising and notifications (that doesn't count SPAM emails which are countless and I hope you don't charge for). That's an extra 1.4 bucks.

I send around a thousand emails a year. That might seem much but it is actually very low. It is only 3 emails per day and you can do much more if you use email for personal and work. That's an extra 4 bucks.

So total is $24.4 assuming you stop your billing there. That's half of FastMail offering for a beta product which from the looks of it offer not interface.

I might come off as rude but I think you need to remove the pay-as-you-go billing and just bill something reasonable for a whole year. Plus offer something more than "Just Email"; like have a differentiating feature like security or privacy.

The thing about actually using Fastmail's 25 GB for $50 is that if you go even slightly over, you're going to need a $90 plan. Most users aren't going to use anything near that amount, especially since our compression is pretty good. (I'm not sure if Fastmail's 25 GB count is compressed or not.)

You're right that I need to add more value. My planned direction is more along the lines of utility than security/privacy, which I think Protonmail covers pretty well. There's a lot of interesting value-add to be done in email.

The pricing is more that we offer honest pay-as-you-go pricing, with caps to make sure you don't actually get a ruinous charge, in direct contrast to "billing something reasonable for a whole year". If you'd rather do the former, then yeah! You're really well covered in the email space already. But I think people are getting subscription fatigue, where every service imaginable wants its $5/month cut of the pie.

I have a currently very low usage domain that I feel I'm paying Fastmail a fair bit for. I wouldn't mind if I was using it a bit more actively but presently I'm not.

I'll sign up to your service shortly; it would be very economical with my current usage!

Good to hear! I'll be sleeping soon, but feel free to email my support address or just comment directly if you have any issues.

Roger - it'll be in the next week or so. Just need the time :-)

> Fastmail's 25 GB for $50 is that if you go even slightly over, you're going to need a $90 plan. Most users aren't going to use anything near that amount

Except the users who already are storing 25GB of mail?

I have ten years of mail on FM. Even with multiple years of multiple heavy mailing lists, sending and receiving photos, etc., I'm at about 4.2GB.

I'm trying to think about how you could offer more reassurance. Off the top of my head,

- Offer a calculator so that people can estimate their own cost. A small improvement, probably not significant impact.

- Offer a customer to enter their current IMAP creds, give an accurate estimate based on past usage. A big improvement, but which would require significant trust from the prospective client. Hard sell.

- Offer a guarantee of some kind. "If you don't come off cheaper with Purely, we'll make up for the difference". Reassuring, but increases your risk.

- Up the price of storage, and eliminate the price of traffic. Storage is probably an imperfect but adequate proxy for total usage price, given that the pattern nowadays is to archive rather than delete (non-spam) email.

> Offer a customer to enter their current IMAP creds

A huge majority of users use free webmail providers, and the biggest players in that space all allow Oauth access to email. Oauth can be scoped down to just the access you need, whereas if you give out IMAP creds those can be used to wipe somebody's email account.

Also, at least in Gmail's setup [0], the IMAP password seems to be your "Gmail password", which is the same thing as your Google account password. Don't ask for this. You don't want to have these passwords enter your company's infrastructure.

[0] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7126229?visit_id=6368...

All good ideas. I think it'll also help a lot if in a year or so I'm able to say "99% of our customers only spend $X a year".

I actually just checked the storage price, and I notice that at some point I added a $2/10,000 charge to the equation at some point, which is almost all of the charge price. I'm going to remove that tomorrow, since it was probably just paranoia and not actual cost plus margin.

Hi Felz, I hope my reply didn't come as rude :) I was just suggesting. If you found customers interested in that kinda scheme good for you (the money does the talk after-all).

But I still don't think your offer is reasonable. I consume around 600mb of storage, so if you go above 25gb you'll probably get a 20-30usd bill from the send/receive billing.

> But I think people are getting subscription fatigue, where every service imaginable wants its $5/month cut of the pie.

Exactly, so your solution is to complicate the billing process?

Here is a better deal:

- $xx/year fix - $0.xx/year for storage

No other fees. Sending/Receive emails should not add to your overhead that much (unless the user is abusing).

I didn't take it as rude! I appreciate your input. And I agree that the billing will seem more complicated until and unless I can win enough trust that users realize the costs don't matter, because they'll come out ahead.

You're right that sending/receiving don't add to overhead much. The receipt is actually way overinflated right now, and should be down to a more reasonable number tomorrow (about $0.03/1000). I might just waive it completely if it complicates things too much.

Sending is much harder, because I need to deter spammers. I priced it significantly above Mailchimp's price for that reason. But the cost will definitely go down as my ability to detect and ban spammers improves, and we'll likely end up pretty much with a scheme like you're proposing.

As a less technical user, the number of sent emails is a little not straightforward to me. Like if I'm in a group email with 50 other people and I reply all, is that 50 separate emails or just one email charged?

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