Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cpoll | Hacker News Reader

The title is a bit clickbaity. The thing most people associate Gandi with, domain name registration, is going up 25-50%. The 1000% is this:

> Now, Gandi will raise the prices of the Standard mailbox plan from €0.35/month to €3.99/month per mailbox, a 1040% increase.

View on HN

25-50% for domain names is too much for me, I'm switching to pork bun as my domains come up for renewal.

The pricing structure is now quite incomparable to most other registrars, e.g. .dev, .de and .cyou now all cost the same 24 Euros / year, which appears to be their new price floor now.

24 Euros for .de, one of the cheapest ccTLDs, is almost daylight robbery, IMO.

Yeah, that's not an unreasonable price. Just ticking off the features (which doesn't tell the whole story) Gandi's email service provides something between fastmail's $3 and $5 plans, and similar to protonmail's $3.99 plan.

That €0.35/month plan was a steal. Most places don't even offer backup store-and-forward SMTP for that let alone full email hosting. Of course, now that they are pricing themselves the same as their competitors they will be held to the same standard, and we'll see how that holds up.

Fastmail and protonmail offer a lot more than just postfix+dovecot hosting. Fastmail developed new standard, brand new webmail UI, brand new webmail client. That's a lot of added value. Protonmail is heaven for crypto nerds which has its own intrinsic value as well.

Ordinary mail hosting is nothing special. Anybody can do it with very little investments. Of course if they can charge for it, good for them. But I don't think it's fair to compare those services. It's like comparing AWS and some random VPS hosting with cpanel just because both can launch debian VPS.

Fastmail also includes DNS, a few GB of storage and optionally static web hosting from said storage. They're also providing you with a caldav server for synced calendar, notes and contacts

Tasks can also be synced over Fastmail servers, though they do not provide a UI for it.

Counterpoint: if you compare Gandi's old/existing prices for all other products (domains, hosting, etc.) with the competition, they are not exactly on the cheap end. It seems to me they've always positioned themselves as a premium option. So either they decided to make an exception for email (why?) or the €0.35/month price is not necessarily the steal you think it is.

Its the choose the number that make things look worse. If the article stated it increased €43 Euros a year, it doesn't sound as bad. Its still a large increase, but not as jaw dropping as the % makes it seem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com