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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

I love Protonmail, me and my entire family would have already been on it with a nice custom domain if that wouldn't cost me 32 euro's a month (4 mailboxes: me, wife and 2 kids, per year payment reduces it to 25/month). I now pay 6.05 euro's for that at Transip (can go up to 5 addresses + hosting space, 3 addresses is 3 euro's). I like Protonmail more, better, cleaner webUI, focus on privacy, nice app... but it's really really expensive.

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> I like Protonmail more, better, cleaner webUI, focus on privacy, nice app... but it's really really expensive.

Have you considered something like Mailbox.org instead? It's also privacy-focused, European-based, allows custom domains, and starts at 1€ / month without any yearly commitments. Also, no proprietary stuff and much less marketing crap.

wouldn't that be 48 euro/year for the four individuals in gp post?

That's in comparison to 32€ / month at ProtonMail, according to the previous comment.

There are good options that are far cheaper:

* Mailbox.org has a per mailbox price that starts at EUR 1 per month

* Runbox has similar options

* Mailfence is another one, but I have no idea how easy it is to use for setting up the custom domain and mailboxes (last I checked quite sometime ago, the setup involved contacting them)

* Migadu has an "all you can eat" pricing that starts at USD 48 per year, with restrictions placed on how many emails you can send per day. For those who don't use email accounts to send a lot of mails, I don't think there's anything that can beat Migadu on price.

All the above providers are based out of Europe. All of them provide direct IMAP support (unlike ProtonMail where you have to use a bridge application).

For those who don't mind US based hosting, Mxroute is another provider that's slightly similar to Migadu on the hosting several mailboxes for a fixed price.

Think of it the other way around: how much per month is Google making by reading your email (with bots) to generate a marketing profile so companies can buy targeted ads to sell you stuff? Besides, feature-wise, you get a LOT more from ProtonMail than, say, Fastmail, which is the low-feature, no-frills, non-encrypted alternative.

If you aren’t paying for the product then you ARE the product.

Google have not scanned emails for the purposes of targeting advertising for a couple of years now.

I'm not really sure this is 100% true. I recently got a fight confirmation email and immediately started getting "things to see in LOCATION" push notifications from Google maps. I'm not sure of course that they really read my email, but it did convince me to look at alternatives.

They still scan for implementing things like assistant functionality but not outright advertising.

I would actually like to see a source for this claim. Google did state that it would stop scanning emails for targeting ads "later this year" at some point in time. But I haven't seen a document after that reaffirming that this has been done.

I suspect GDPR would have been sufficient threat since not all people involved in a scanned email were guaranteed to be Gmail users, so gaining consent would have been problematic.

As a Fastmail user (that's perfectly capable of managing his own PGP keys), what features am I missing? I honestly can't think of a single feature that'd make me go "I wish Fastmail had that".

How about labels that operate independently of folders like Protonmail has?

If you're not using your own domain, and are instead using the provider's domain for addresses, one huge difference is that Fastmail recycles deleted addresses within a few months, whereas ProtonMail never recycles addresses on its domains. That to me is critical.

> Think of it the other way around: how much per month is Google making by reading your email [...]

That is a really weird way to think about it. For all I may know, google may be earning a million dollar by selling my data ... does not make the alternative product worth the money google is making for me to pay to avoid it.

What I find weird is that you need to install a separate bridge app to use IMAP. It seems a hassle to me. How did you solve this?

I didn't because I'm not paying... But I do know that the bridge ensures that all data is always locally de and encrypted before being read from and sent to the Protonmail servers. So Protonmail can never read your mail. On the other side of the bridge, your standard email client can talk normal imap (which does not support encryption). I think it is rather elegant.

Speaking of clean WebUI, the beta for the redesign is live: https://beta.protonmail.com/inbox

I've been using it since it came out a week ago or so and am rather pleased.

Sometimes a good product costs more money.

This is a terrible comment. 32 is clearly far above a competitive rate for comparable services.

Indeed and the build up is strange because a one person account is 5 euros (4 paying yearly) a month. But then add a family with (2) kids that hardly do email, use the same domain, may even share the same GBs and for 4 persons it becomes more than 5 times as expensive. All separate accounts is not an option because we share a domain... It's very weird and aimed a single people I think.

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