FastMail – still good value in 2025?
When I divorced Google from my life I had to find new providers for basic productivity services, like e-mail, calendar, and contact lists. Of course, many people think they’re getting these services for free from the tech giants – Google, Apple, Microsoft – but they’re not. They’re paying with their privacy. The rest of us are paying, too, because of the increased cost of advertising.
I’ve used FastMail for a couple of years and I remain pretty happy with their service. It does all the things that I previously used Google for: it has a nice web interface and a nicely-integrated smartphone app; it works with Android’s calendar/contact/mail infrastructure (albeit with some fiddling); it plays nicely with Linux desktop applications like Thunderbird; and it is (or was) reasonably priced.
So I was rather annoyed to get an e-mail last week, telling me that FastMail was increasing its fees. The price for a basic, single-user subscription in the UK will increase from £47 to £54 – that’s 15%. On the one hand, an increase of £7 per year is not a major challenge to my finances. On the other hand, I’m very fussy about the value for money of everything. I grew up in a time and place where every penny mattered and, sixty years later, I think this remains a healthy attitude – within reason.
You see, I’m cognizant of the fact that, if I apply any monetary value at all to my time, I’ve already spent more than the £7 extra that FastMail wants, just researching alternatives. In fact, writing this post cost me more. But there’s a matter of principle at stake: if a business increases its costs by 15%, there had better be a darned good reason, if it wants to keep my custom.
It’s particularly galling when businesses wrap up their price increases in specious “features” that I don’t need. For example, FastMail tells me that they’ve “listened to user requests”, and I will now be billed in UK rather than US currency. Whoop-de do. All this means is that they can set different prices in different countries. And they do: at the current exchange rate of 74p to the dollar, the US price of $60 equates to £44.40. So FastMail not only put up their prices, they’ve hidden how much more expensive their service is in the UK than elsewhere.
So I feel it’s time to re-examine FastMail’s value proposition, in the face of stiff competition from Proton Mail, tuta Mail, and Posteo.
Note
These aren’t the only providers of e-mail services. I’ve chosen them for this article because they make strong claims to privacy and the rejection of advertising, and have no connection to the tech giants.
TL;DR – FastMail is no longer particularly good value. But it’s the nearest I’ve found to a drop-in replacement for Google’s e-mail, calendar, etc. The increased convenience might be worth the extra cost – for now, at least.
Basic price comparison
It’s hard to compare services of this kind, because they all offer different things. For the level of service I use, FastMail will cost me £54 next year. The Proton “Mail Plus” service costs just under £40 per year, but it offers less storage, and doesn’t include file sharing or contact management. It does allow for more than one email address, but not the six hundred that FastMail allows. I don’t think I’ll ever need this many but, in fact, I do use several dozen, for different purposes.
On the other hand, “Proton Unlimited” at just under £100 does offer file sharing, and a colossal 500Gb of storage. But it also includes services that I don’t need at present, like a VPN. I do use a VPN, but I’m not looking to change providers right now, and the “Unlimited” service would still be more expensive than FastMail, even if I switched to the Proton VPN.
tuta’s service is much cheaper than either FastMail or Proton. Its basic service costs €3 per month, so just over £30 per year at the current exchange rate. This service does include calendars, but not file sharing. The total email storage allowance is 15Gb, which is more than enough for me.
Posteo is a small, German company that offers a bare-bones service with a very low starting price of €12 per year. They charge extra for storage beyond the 2Gb minimum, and for additional e-mail aliases beyond the two included. The idea of only paying for exactly what you need is an attractive one, but the additional costs would work out expensive for my usage: probably about £25 per year.
It’s worth pointing out that both Proton and tuta have a “free” service, with limited features and storage. If all you need is a web-based e-mail service, either of these providers will probably suffice. Neither funds its free service using advertising or selling users’ data. Proton makes it perfectly clear that its free service is funded by paid subscribers. tuta is not so clear, but I imagine they do the same because, after all, somebody has to pay. Frankly, I’m not sure how I’d feel about my subscription being used to fund people who aren’t paying anything, and the lack of a free tier from FastMail and Posteo is potentially a benefit to me.
It’s worth bearing in mind, though, that if you want to try Posteo, it’s only going to cost you €1, since they charge by the month.
The problem is that FastMail is a different kind of service than those offered by Proton and tuta, and this makes comparison a lot more difficult than it seems, even if the features were identical.
Why privacy isn’t the same as security, and why that matters (maybe)
FastMail and Posteo offer a ‘conventional’ email and calendar service (as does Google). By that I mean they uses industry-standard protocols like IMAP, SMTP, CardDAV and CalDAV. It’s relatively easy to integrate FastMail and Posteo with any client you like, on any platform. All the services in this article provide a web interface, and some (FastMail, Proton) provide smartphone apps as well.
These conventional protocols are secure, but they don’t fully enforce privacy. Data is encrypted in flight, making it very difficult for an intruder to intercept or tamper with messages on the wire. So it’s secure. But data is not encrypted in storage – at least, if it is, it’s encrypted in a way that can be decrypted by the administrators. So it’s not fully private; at least not as private as it could be. In fact, these traditional protocols don’t support full, end-to-end encryption. FastMail and Posteo are clear that their staff can read your e-mails and some other data. The same is true for Google Mail, but Google is less transparent about this. Posteo does not associate any personal details with an e-mail account so, in theory, there’s no way to link an e-mail address to a specific individual, even with access to the messages. That’s all very well, but most of my e-mails contain my name and other contact details in the headers or body, so I’m not sure how much protection that is.
Proton and tuta, in contrast, do offer full end-to-end encryption. Data is stored in a way that even the provider’s staff can’t access. Of course, this data has to be decrypted before it can be sent to an e-mail client that does not support end-to-end encryption – that’s basically all of them, apart from the service providers’ own. However, that decryption happens only as the data is in transit. It would be very hard even for the provider’s staff to intercept your data at this point.
FastMail and Posteo both have their main selling point that their services are easy to use, and not involved in surveillance capitalism. They don’t show ads, nor do they support advertisers. Neither claim that your data is fully private in the sense I used the word earlier and, indeed, it is not. Proton and tuta both offer a service that is both secure and very private, at the expense of struggling to support traditional protocols.
How important is it, that your stored data is not fully private? It’s not hugely important to me, because I don’t have a lot of secrets. If FastMail suffered a data breach (and a new, major data breach is reported at least weekly), or was compelled to hand over my data to some law-enforcement agency, this would not be a huge concern to me. In any event, on the rare occasions when I really do have to send a e-mail in a way that is completely private, I use methods that are available to e-mail clients, like PGP. This is somewhat inconvenient, but not a show-stopper, because I so rarely have to do it. Both FastMail and Posteo document how to use their services with PGP.
On the other hand, if I lived under a repressive regime, or I were an investigative journalist working undercover on stories about such regimes, or if I were vulnerable in some other way, then I might need the additional privacy offered by end-to-end encryption. In that case, I imagine I’d be willing to put up with the additional inconvenience.
How privacy is inconvenient
Why does any of this matter? Proton and tuta both offer a service that is cheaper than FastMail, while implementing a higher level of privacy. What’s not to like?
A crucial question is this: how important is it to you, that your email service support standard protocols like IMAP? If you use only the service provider’s web client, then most likely it isn’t important at all. On the other hand, if you use desktop clients like Thunderbird, or mobile ones like K-9, you could face difficulties. I find that Thunderbird is a hugely superior e-mail client to anybody’s web interface, and I would be badly inconvenienced if I couldn’t use it.
Similarly, on Android I use FastMail’s CardDAV and CalDAV interfaces to connect its contact and calendar services to Android’s infrastructure. Although this is more fiddly to set up than it should be – it works seamlessly once it is. I can also share files between Android and desktop computers using FastMail’s WebDAV service. Again, not trivial to set up, but effective once it is. I presume that Posteo would work in much the same way, although I haven’t yet tried it.
To be fair, Proton provides an Android app; in fact, it provides separate apps for mail and calendar. Of interest to us deGooglers is the fact that their apps are available as plain APK files – you don’t need an app store to get them. But these apps still don’t integrate with Android as well as CalDAV/CardDAV services can, and you still have to accept another app running round-the-clock if you want to get calendar notifications. FastMail also has an Android app, and it works fine; but for most purposes I use the Android built-in contact/calendar/mail framework, because these things just work better for me.
Proton also offers desktop clients and, to their credit again, these are open-source and available for Linux. But what do you do if, in spite of all these offerings, you still want to use your favourite e-mail/calendar/contact/file sharing applications?
Proton provides a “bridge” application, which interfaces between its end-to-end encrypted service, and traditional protocols like IMAP. So you’d run Proton Bridge on your desktop computer, and connect your e-mail client to the bridge, rather than the service. Thunderbird actually has built-in support for this: if you add a Proton e-mail address, it will assume the bridge is running, and configure itself to use it.
tuta does not offer any of this infrastructure and, so far as I know, there are no plans to add it.
I have to give Proton credit here: they’re offering a solid, reasonably-priced, end-to-end encrypted service and, knowing that user might prefer to use other clients, they’re offering additional software to improve the compatibility. And it’s all open-source, and subject to external security audit. There really isn’t anything not to like.
Except the inconvenience. I could install Proton Bridge on all the desktop and laptop computers I use, and I could configure all my e-mail software to use it. I could learn to love using Proton’s Android apps, rather than the ones I like. I could, and perhaps I should, but I don’t want to – not to save £7 a year.
Bottom line
All things considered, I still think FastMail offers reasonable value for money in 2025. For my own needs, the convenience it offers makes up for the slightly higher price, compared with the competition. FastMail scores over Posteo in offering an Android app; I don’t use it very often, but it’s very helpful for some things. Posteo’s web interface is mobile-friendly, but it’s not the same as a custom app.
I’m generally a fan of increased data privacy, and it feels odd to be recommending a less private service over more private ones, particularly when the more private ones are cheaper as well. This really goes against the grain.
Unfortunately, the level of privacy enforced by Proton and tuta is just too inconvenient for my modest privacy needs. There must surely be a middle ground between selling all your data to advertisers, and privacy that is so strong that even military agencies can’t break it. FastMail and Posteo both operate in this middle ground, but few other providers do.
I must point out, though, that if my needs were even a little different, the cost/convenience calculation might lead me to another choice. In particular, if I needed to be sure that my data was safe even from oppressive governments or data breaches, both Proton and tuta would be better buys than FastMail. It’s slightly inconvenient for me that Posteo’s per-address charging model doesn’t fit my usage, because its bare-bones service is very cost-effective.
All, of course, are hugely superior to Google, unless you don’t mind being the product.
PS. All the services I’ve mentioned in this article have strengths and weaknesses I haven’t touched on. All offer features that might be of huge importance to some people. Posteo, for example, is very committed to energy-efficiency and, for some reason, vegetarianism, both of which I approve of strongly. It’s definitely worth looking at the providers’ websites in detail.
