I've not spent any time thinking about pricing for email SaaS targeting consumers but a few quick thoughts:
- You have to have a lot of subscribers to make $4/month amount to real money. Also, churn is higher. My SaaS service Cronitor used to offer a $6.99-turned-9.99 plan targeted at individuals and churn rates on that plan is literally 10x higher than our $25 tier.
- If being cheap is your thing, and I'm willing to spend $50/mo for business email, do I feel comfortable going with the people who are competing primarily on price?
Thank you for your comments. However, Migadu is not intended to be "cheap". That is not the selling point of it.
We used to use Google Apps for multiple domains for our starup projects, ideas etc. Switching between these multiple accounts was becoming ridiculous and complex. Then, they made it $5 per account. We actually had many addresses but only two users. Our total cost of that would be measured in hundreds of $ which def would not be worth it.
What I personally dislike regarding other services is that they claim storage as one of the most important selling points but then do not account for the price drop per GB. Since GMail for work launched (2006?), the cost per GB dropped more than sixty fold: http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte-update
Any update in price? Nope.
And then, the price of Google Apps (Gmail) are global. We have clients in Zimbabwe for instance. $5 per month per account is not the same as it would be in the US. Yet if a company from Zimbabwe uses a @gmail address, it won't be taken serious.
Migadu is profitable since a while ago, and real money is relative. We're not after exits and TechCrunch, just doing what we like and hacking at it daily. :) Pays the bills. Ironically, we are also in Switzerland, where living expenses are among the highest in the world.
I agree that your pricing model is more user-friendly and it's more inline with your cost model (mailboxes are free to provide). It's why I clicked on it. I spent about 3 minutes given my browser history, looking at your homepage and pricing page. What I absorbed, after seeing your HN "email from $4/mo" and then your homepage, was that this was primarily about being cheap. Maybe I'm an outlier, but that seemed to be the message you were sending me.
And I totally understand you're not trying to "Tech Crunch", I think a SaaS is a great side business -- i've done this myself -- but also the only way to ensure stability of a project over long term is for it to provide financial rewards inline with effort.
Also, I definitely should've added: Congrats on shipping.
- You have to have a lot of subscribers to make $4/month amount to real money. Also, churn is higher. My SaaS service Cronitor used to offer a $6.99-turned-9.99 plan targeted at individuals and churn rates on that plan is literally 10x higher than our $25 tier.
- If being cheap is your thing, and I'm willing to spend $50/mo for business email, do I feel comfortable going with the people who are competing primarily on price?
As a datapoint, We use Pobox.com for Cronitor.