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Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

I'm always on the lookout for email providers who protect privacy and are cheap. I have three suggestions for you.

Firstly, as others have stated, your pricing is way too complicated for anyone to understand and figure out how much they would be charged. It would be better to make some assumptions and go with pricing based on account, aliases, storage, etc. Your current pricing is almost like one of those cloud service pricing calculators. Very nice in theory for paying based on usage, but practically next to impossible to make any sort of cost estimates on.

Secondly, your privacy policy is very short and doesn't give a lot of comfort. Take a look at Posteo.de to see how privacy is handled. It's one of the best that I know of.

On pricing, also compare with mailbox.org.

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Thanks for the suggestions! I'll look at the privacy policy again and see how I can make it more clear that we're not abusing users' trust.

I did look at mailbox.org. It's about double for their lowest monthly plan, which is reasonable.

Where I hope Purelymail will shine is that it scales a lot more naturally (once you hit mailbox.org's 2 GB cap, you upgrade to a plan that's 2.5x more expensive), it enables use cases that'd get you frowny faces from other providers (because we charge appropriately), and there's no surcharge for things that don't actually cost more.

Want a dozen usernames? Sure, whatever. Need a hundred users? Sure. Store 2 TB of mail for some reason? We've got you covered.

The downside, as you point out, is that the pricing gets a bit scary and I need to work on making it feel safer.

I am too flabbergasted at the complexity of the prices.

Maybe a good idea would be posting a simple online calculator or a downloadable spreadsheet?

As a further side note, I don't understand (for an end user) the reference to:

>Emails sent: $4.03 (if sent externally) or $0.03 (if sent within the same account) per 1000 plus $0.18 per GB

I mean, while sometimes I talk to myself, I never wrote to myself, set aside internal company e-mails, which e-mails are not "sent externally"?

Or am I misunderstanding something?

Domains could be used for groups, like families or companies that send internal email.

Yep, that's why I specified "end user" and "set aside internal company e-mails".

I never thought about the idea of having a "family domain", it could be a nice idea, though I guess its naming could be a possible venue for in-family disputes?

Rather than having in-family disputes, I've had relatively poor luck giving way vanity email addresses to family members. There's a lack of understanding and interest in how the email address would work in combination with an existing email account.

My name is "Mark Stosberg" and my email is "mark@stosberg.com".

Yep, I meant that:

1) my mom won't have an e-mail address with the surname of her first husband (my dad, passed away)

2) my brother-in-law (brother of my wife) surely won't have it

3) my cousins all have different surnames

4) my wife may accept one, but I talk with her every day and when we don't meet or talk via phone we tend to communicate via post-its on the fridge or similar

The pricing would definitely be much easier to understand with a calculator.

However, I have no quarrel with the approach to pricing here. In order for a service like this to succeed with very established incumbents, it needs to differentiate itself enough to carve out its own niche.

Sent externally means to a different account or provider. So basically, sending email to yourself or other users using your account is much cheaper. (There's no spam worries there.)

So where is posteo.de pricing and sign up? I can’t find it.

Sign up is in the header bar (Button named "Sign Up") and a second option is in about the middle of the start page. Pricing is mentioned both on the signup page and on the start page, starts at 1 EUR/month.

Using smaller iphone, sign up is nowhere. Not in the hamburger, nowhere else.

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