It's $50/year for mails to an unlimited number of aliases on all my domains to go into a single mailbox. Hooking up new domains is easy, as is configuring them to absorb arbitrary aliases. All quite reasonable, as far as I'm concerned.
The only reason they are not disrupted, I believe, is that most people are okay with free email, and businesses that want to be more secure keep their email inside their premises.
FYI ~70-80% of our business costs are staff. We are the primary maintainers of Cyrus (https://cyrusimap.org/) the open source mail server we run. We develop our own webmail, which we believe is the best in the world. We do a lot of standards work: at the IETF we're heavily involved in both the EXTRA group (maintaining IMAP) and the JMAP group (new advanced sync protocol which we hope will in the future replace IMAP/CardDAV/CalDAV). We're also involved with CalConnect developing future calendaring standards, and are contributing to ARC development with M3AAWG and the IETF. Good engineers ain't cheap.
On top of that, we run our own machines, built to our own specifications to continually get faster performance (including putting indexes and recent mail on enterprise-grade SSDs) and more reliability (live replicas to secondary machines and data centres).
If you can do all that for $5/month, well, we welcome the competition and hope you too will work together for a more open, standards-based future.
Do you have any plans to add tags/labels in your web and app client? It's a very flexible feature that enable some (very) productivity increasing workflows for me.
Lets say that a mail tick in from the scouts, it's a bill for this years summer camp. With labels I would label it Invoice and Scouting. If I need to see all invoices for 2018 I will just search for that label and received in 2018. Same with mails relating to scouting. Without labels I can only save it in one folder, and searches are not guaranteed to catch everything unless I constantly make sure a search captures the mail every time I would set a label on it.
Of the $50, my guess is that $15-20 covers the costs of hosting and support. That's a margin of 70% – could even be closer to 85% which wouldn't be uncommon for SaaS.
However, there are large fixed costs: an office, a development team, etc. Taking these into account, and the fact that Fastmail is a small business - they are never going to have the hyper growth of an ad-supported free model – I'd say this is a profitable, healthy business, charging reasonable amounts.
Could someone do hosted email for $40 for the same thing? Almost certainly. Could they charge $10 for something far less good (reliable, feature complete, less space, worse support, etc) yes – this is what hosting providers like GoDaddy do. Could someone do $10 for the same featureset, profitably? Almost certainly not.
