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Comment by yegg | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo has been profitable since 2014 through private search ads, and our company is not controlled or beholden to venture capital (or VC or other money).

Our product vision is an "easy button" for privacy, an all-in-one privacy app. Email protection is part of that, along with search, browsing, etc. Put another way, we see email protection as part of our core product, and within our app we autofill duck addresses in email forms.

We will take your comment into consideration, though we prefer free services where possible so more people can get privacy protection, which is in line with our mission. This service comes with it a set of privacy guarantees here: https://duckduckgo.com/email/privacy-guarantees and we will not be putting ads on it.

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This answers the VC money fear, but not everything else OP brought up.

If a product is subsidized by a company's other products, it's hard for me to believe it'll be around forever. For an email product, that's a huge problem, because I use my address in hundreds of contexts that take a long time to identify and migrate, much longer than a typical company's sunsetting notice.

EDIT: The parent comment was edited to note that they perceive DDG Email as part of the core product, not a separate product. That's helpful to know, but I'm still skeptical that that's sustainable in the long term. This would not be the first time a feature was cut from a product because it was too expensive to maintain. I'll be waiting to see their unified privacy solution really take off before I place any bets on this feature.

The business case seems pretty obvious: They're using this as a way of getting people to install a browser extension / app, and changing their default search engine. A search user is valuable, which makes customer acquisition expensive. This also makes their extension way more sticky.

Just because you're a product doesn't mean the service is not sustainable. It should be very easy for them to figure out whether the feature is profitable or not compared to other acquisition methods.

Perhaps for them it's a loss leader, but for someone using this to sign up to stuff.. I would like to use this for almost all services but given the business model here I would be uncomfortable using this beyond the more spammy stuff (not that that's not useful!)

Nothing will be around forever.

DDG has regularly raised money from VCs including a Series D about a year ago. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/duck-duck-go/company...

I can't speak for their circumstances, but I'd assume a VC-backed company describing themselves as "not beholden" to VCs means they're default alive without additional fundraising, and that they haven't given over majority control of the board to their investors.

Part of privacy is reliability and certainty. Just take people's money like Proton, you can still have a free tier.

You have "email protection" but do you have nice stuff like sandbox detonation and private intel partnerships with companies like Proofpoint? That as a premium might be worth charging. Heck, even public yara rule scanning and allowing inbox owners to set things like DMARC enforcement and custom rules and actions would be a nice premium.

Can you build an email hosting service on par with Gmail? I'd really like to get out of being on Google

Have you tried FastMail? Probably the closest thing to a G Suite/Workspace alternative that doesn't have ties to "Big Tech".

How does it compare to ProtonMail? I’m paying for the Proton VPN/mail bundle, but I haven’t really used the mail yet.

Not GP, but here are a couple of differences.

Fastmail’s email servers are in the US and the company is in Australia. Both are in the five eyes jurisdictions, plus Australia has some draconian laws (see Assistance and Access Bill, though email itself is generally not a secure enough channel). ProtonMail is in Switzerland, which is better surveillance-wise, but it still complies (as one would expect a company to) with court orders and has disclosed the IP address of an activist due to a court order.

Fastmail supports IMAP, which means you can use any email client on a desktop or phone. ProtonMail does not support IMAP directly on desktops and requires a “bridge application” for IMAP. This is provided for paying customers. ProtonMail does not have any support for IMAP on smartphones, where you’re either left to using the browser or using the ProtonMail app.

+1 for Fastmail.

I love that DuckDuckGo is based in Paoli. Grew up in the area and it's crazy to think there's an innovative tech company in a sleepy Philly suburb haha. Keep up the great work!

Even if ads do not appear on the product, it doesn’t mean that the data isn’t used to drive ads revenue. Are these addresses used for conversion measurement?

But why prioritize this over building your own index and not relying on Microsoft?

In terms of value to the end user, and a mission of expanding privacy-improving practices through their services, I can see why a feature like email protection would be prioritized over a proprietary index.

While one may marginally improve some aspects of the service and has strategic value, the other actually moves the needle in terms of an end-user's overall privacy.

What’s the point of email forwarding for a search engine that no longer has an index? Licensing Bing results is all of DDG business but a rounding error for Microsoft. That’s a very precarious positron to be in.

Email forwarding and search are orthogonal products solving different issues, so first, I’d point out that the value of the email forwarding service doesn’t change.

But presumably DDG has contractual agreements with Microsoft so “no longer has an index” is a hypothetical that isn’t really grounded in reality or something that would be likely to happen without warning.

And if Bing is no longer viable at some point for some reason, that would be a good reason to change the priority of building an index.

But clearly DDG feels secure enough in their current agreement, and as of now, we have no reason to believe otherwise.

He/she probably meant: keep it free with a donate button.

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