Comment by yottabyte47 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yottabyte47 | Hacker News Reader

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Sending/receiving data (in this case email) uses energy. Since energy is not currently free, someone has to pay for it.

A service that involves the repeated sending/receiving of data, (in this case email) incurs a cost over time that someone has to pay for.

There are three solutions to this issue:

A. Run a free service until you run out of money. (not sustainable)

B. Run a free service subsidized by ads. (user-hostile and possibly unsustainable)

C. Charge the user a subscription fee. (fair and sustainable)

Unfortunately, the perception that email and other services should be free has permeated society. The internet made the transfer of information cheaper by many orders of magnitude, but it is still not free.

But you have to provide your own e-mail service and e-mail hosting. They aren't hosting your e-mail[0]. How do they justify a recurring annual subscription?

0: "Your email is never stored on our servers, and is left on your current email servers."

They are still providing a service. Creating and maintaining an application takes time and time is money.

I think my point still stands as a general principle though, its applicability (or the lack thereof) to this particular service notwithstanding.

You're ignoring the fact that the $35,000 they're trying to raise is listed as being for exactly that:

> Where the money will go... Hosting. We need some serious hosting space to deploy our storage-intensive services.

I'm not ignoring that. If they only raise $35,000 then they'd fall into category A. The cost of hosting is ongoing as long as a service is being used, therefore they will need more than $35,000 if they plan to be around for any length of time, hence subscriptions.

Yeah, its actually pretty dumb IMO that they say the money will go to hosting. With AWS etc you only use what you pay for and the costs should be pretty minimal for beta testing and then covered by subscription fees once they launch.

Money going towards mobile dev makes more sense although is much more risky to back given the short timeframe and limited budget even if they meet their goal.

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