I disagree. You charge a very high price for a service because you know you have no competition, like Apple does. You have your right to do so. But that's the way it is.
As I said here: https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/01/fastmail-advent-2016/
... one of the most common questions was "aren't you worried about giving away all your secrets?" Actually, we really are not. Running an email service is hard work, and providing the speed, reliability and stream of new features would not be easy to replicate. So we're happy to share our stories...
We contribute a lot to open source, and we're doing a lot in the standards space now to make sure email remains open. Topicbox is built on top of a draft of the JMAP protocol which is currently being worked on at the IETF, and will be updated to follow the standard. We have staff going to CalConnect to work on calendaring standards in a couple of weeks because we're investing in advancing the field as well. That also costs money, and we're self funded, so we can't afford to sell email accounts at a loss.
It also means we have no secret customer. Our paying customers are our actual customers, not the product we're using to pump up the valuation or collect data from. It's a simple business proposition, money for service. I'm proud to charge money for what we do.
As an actual, paying customer I just want to express just how much I appreciate that someone is actually doing this.
The internet has lots of creepy companies spying on your every move. Actually paying for a service and knowing that there's nobody looking over your shoulder feels really good. I wish there were more companies like that.
This is the hard bit about trying to sell Topicbox to you lot - you already HAVE a good interface to email, and the value of the easy-to-use archive comes later when you add another person to a group months down the track.
Thank you.
I would gladly pay quadruple that if I had to.
Fastmail looks absolutely incredible and I've never heard the slightest bad thing about them, but it'd cost me $250/month to get the same level of service I get now for free. :/
That's exactly the reason I migrated to Fastmail. Ever since Google shutdown Reader, I've been slowly replacing Google services with alternatives as much as I can.
Gmail -> Fastmail
Calendar -> Fastmail
Reader -> Self-hosted Commafeed
Drive -> Self-hosted Nextcloud
etc.