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Comment by nomilk | Hacker News Reader

For small startups, what are some good alternatives to Workspace?

I use workspace due to familiarity with Gmail, and no other reason. Would love to know some cheap/easy alternatives.

Free, nothing worth writing home about. Technically you can do this for free with an Apple account but its a total mess of a system and incredibly buggy, not to mention essentially no spam filtering.

Paid you've got ProtonMail and FastMail, both decent options.

Thanks. Just had a quick look at both. Proton is 6.99 euro/user/month and fastmail is similar (9 aud/user/month). Vaguely similar pricing to Google workspace.

This can add up quickly if you’re the kinda person who flings together an experimental site and lets it run its course. For example say 3 emails per site (info@, no-reply@, and your-name@) and 10 various small sites per year.. starts to add up.

Would be awesome if there were an alternative that you pay, say $10, and get as many email addresses as you can be bothered to set up.

I have absolutely no clue how the underlying economics of email services work, so I presume what I’m hoping for isn’t feasible.

A user is not the same as an email address! You can have up to 100 domains and (with wildcard aliases) basically unlimited addresses with a single user at Fastmail - you just pay per inbox.

I know someone else already mentioned about user != email address. But in the situation you mentioned I tend to use cloudflare and have that do a catchall on the domain for side projects and forward it over to my main account. I have a generic name I launch all my sideprojects under to cover this.

I've been using zoho. It just gets out of the way, but I mostly use email clients and their web interface rarely, but it seems good enough. And their prices are much lower than competitors.

For emails specifically you could use something like ImprovMX to set up the forwarding and continue using Gmail.

Hey is another good paid option.

I've used Apple Mail for years (in addition to gMail). Never had any problems with it. Don't seem to get more spam there than I do with gMail.

Sadly there isn't a single good alternative. I'm switching email to Proton and Drive to BackBlaze for backups and S3 for sharing. Then using Google Sheets shared with me but not sharing back.

I use Migadu for email. Great service that doesn't get in my way of using my email the way I need to (which isn't anything crazy honestly).

Are they any free email services that allow you to use your own domain?

Zoho is a somewhat well-known provider that has a "forever free" plan for up to five users.

The only caveat is no IMAP in the free version, you have to use their apps / web interface.

iCloud Mail (if you have paid iCloud...) is free to add custom domains.

Proton has a pretty good suite of tools for a similar price.

I just gave up my domain and went back to gmail.

I used amazon workmail for a while.

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