Ask HN: Is there a free alternative to Gmail with Custom Domains?

1 point·metadat··5 comments

If it is free how do they pay their staff, server bills, stuff like that?

Gmail has never been free. They charge businesses to pay into whitelists based on volume when that volume exceeds some threshold. No idea what that threshold is currently these days. The more people that use gmail, the more businesses that are compelled to pay into whitelisting to reach their clients and prospects. Those costs are passed onto their customers. Alternatively some businesses pay email campaign providers that in turn also pay Google.

Right. But Google’s ability to do that is unique because they are at the center of a two-sided market in content and eyeballs. Bing search is not too different from Google in quality, but Google makes many times more $ per impression than Bing.

I’m asking how a new ‘free’ email service is going to work: is it going to compete with Google on its own turf and be ad supported? Is it going to sell your inbox to foreign intelligence services? Is it funded by a philanthropist?

is it going to compete with Google on its own turf and be ad supported? Is it going to sell your inbox to foreign intelligence services? Is it funded by a philanthropist?

All great questions. I could not even begin to speculate how to answer them short of hiring an army of private investigators, investigative journalists and other things I could never afford. Even if one were a philanthropist that would not be mutually exclusive to the other possibilities you mentioned. Some of the wealthiest philanthropists have started off as the golden children of the state.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-backtracks-to-allow-fre...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com