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Comment by lordofgibbons | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to switch over to Fastmail from Gmail with my custom domain email, but I face two hurdles before being able to move over:

1) Going from $0 to $50/year is such a tough pill to swallow ..

2) I have a ton of documents in Google docs. Will those continue to work, and if not, what's the alternative? Google is terrible for privacy, but at least my sensitive documents aren't going to get stolen. I'm not sure I'll trust a startup to my personal docs. Self-hosting is such a massive pain, so not something I want to do.

Would love advice on transitioning away from the big G.

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For (1): consider that your entire digital life is bound to your email address. In a sense, Google owns you. $50/yr is a small price to pay for truly owning your digital life. That’s what I tell myself, anyway.

(I recently renewed my Fastmail subscription for an additional two years)

I left Gmail for that exact reason. I just didn’t want to wake up one day to find my digital life had been locked out because Google Photos has thought my picture of a funny tree was somehow an object that violates their terms of service. Fastmail has been great, and I also prepaid for multiple years. No complaints.

> $50/yr is a small price to pay for truly owning your digital life.

For some people it’s not just $50. If their whole family is on GSuite Legacy, for example, migrating away will be 4-5 times that, or more.

I wish Fastmail offered storaged-based pricing without a hard limit on the number of accounts.

> 1) Going from $0 to $50/year is such a tough pill to swallow ..

If you’re in a first-world country and knowledgeable enough to be reading HN: how can that be? It’s one coffee a month. If needed, think of it as charity to support an indie developer.

#2 is not an issue. Your Google account and associated files and services continue to work. Email moves, nothing else.

On your second point - do you need to transition documents? If it's free you may as well just keep them with Google.

> I'm not sure I'll trust a startup

Is Fastmail considered a startup? They've been there for a while.

No, they seem trustworthy. I meant I don't trust a startup to host my documents (Google drive alternative) because Fastmail doesn't have a google docs alternative as far as I'm aware.

> ... custom domain ... > 1) Going from $0 to $50/year is such a tough pill to swallow.

Didn't google already solve this problem for you? They removed the free tier for custom domains in ~GApps~ Google Workspaces.

At least for me, the switch was a forcing function to move off.

>Didn't google already solve this problem for you? They removed the free tier for custom domains in ~GApps~ Google Workspaces.

FWIW, I have a custom domain with GMail for free. All incoming email to *@thedomain land in my GMail inbox, though replying is more of a faff since I have to individually add each one with its own app password pointing to GMail's own SMTP server.

https://support.google.com/domains/answer/6328630?hl=en (the "Email forwarding" option) + https://support.google.com/domains/answer/9437157?hl=en . People like lordofgibbons might have such a setup.

They backtracked on that for personal/family use.

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