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Comment by tmallen | Hacker News Reader

Fastmail's not an alternative. I use it and it's great, but with Gmail you're talking 15GB+ free, and the ticker and 2GB was what set Gmail apart in the first place when it was invite-only. I pay Fastmail $30 a year (not much, granted) for only 500MB (!). I don't see who's going to realistically take on Gmail in the free space.

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Honestly, we're not interested in people who aren't willing to pay for service. We're not selling ads, we don't have a second revenue stream. Servers cost money, multiple replica redundancy plus backups cost money.

Shiny new SSDs allowing us to serve the entire last week's email of every user from SSD so that first page view is always lightning fast cost money.

We think that's worth 11 cents per day (Enhanced account).

Really thinking of switching. Heard lots of great things.

One question - how is customer support?

Huh? 1GB is $20/year, 15GB is $40/year – https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html

Ah, a long time since I first signed up, maybe the prices have changed, maybe not, but either way you're getting a lot more storage with Gmail for the price.

But you're evaluating that in a vacuum. When J. Random User is evaluating a solution for his/her email, cost-per-storage-unit isn't usually the highest thing on list (or at least not the only thing).

I believe that the vast majority of email users want nothing but free webmail.

> free

Some people realise that free services have disadvantages - ads, lack of customer support, restrictions on use, etc.

GMail has some great features, but I fully understand some people wanting to move away to other solutions.

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