I find it astonishing how much people devalue software and information services. The same people who have to have a $1500 phone and seem to think nothing of dropping $150 a month on Verizon or AT&T won't spend $5 on any cloud service.

This is why Google keeps winning and everyone else is losing, particularly the people who get the "free" services but don't have any say about those services.

The real numbers might be different, but I heard that Google gets about $100/yr in ad revenue per user. That is, they are getting $800 a year for all of those people. Everything you buy is $800 more expensive and there is no way you can say no to that!

You can add your “generic address” to another inbox as an “alias” free of charge.

$210 annually seems like a deal if it keeps your family’s most sensitive private messages away from ad targeting.

Fastmail allows for email aliases. These aren't those addresses with a `+` on them, but rather completely different addresses. You can put the family address and generic address in your own or your wife's account and setup a filter so that email to those addresses go to separate folders automatically. That saves you $60/year. If your children don't need privacy from one another (I've no clue how old they are or how well they get along), maybe you can also group them into 1 account to save you another $90/year.

By the way, Fastmail prices are rising. One used to be able to get a free account, and the standard plan used to be $40 a year, so might be good to get them sooner rather than later to get grandfathered-in in case of upcoming price risings.

Can you honestly not afford it? Or do you just think it shouldn't cost $20/month? I'm the sole income earner in a family of 5 and switched us to fastmail.

A lot depends upon how frugal you already are, but I found it trivial to find some extra savings to pay for it. There's a few things I like to treat myself to, and doing that one less time per month pays for it. Eating out one less time per month pays for it too. Ordering slightly cheaper meals for myself when we eat out would also pay for it.

Hell, when I turned off my home server, which I rarely used, I saved $9/month in electricity. If you live in a high power cost state, do a personal power audit. Our family was pretty lazy with turning things off until I figured out how much it costs to run any given thing.

With a family of 6, if you haven't crunched your finances, there are lots of very minor behavior changes that can save you enough money to pay for something like fastmail.

Migadu is the place to go--they charge for traffic, not mailboxes. I'm in a similar boat with lots of domains, aliases, and mailboxes. My family comfortably fits in their "mini" plan, $48/year.

Used to be, but it's probably popular enough now that still offering free accounts without any way to profit off of them might be too burdensome.