FounderMail vs Fastmail
Fastmail has been doing this for twenty-five years and does it well. This is a comparison, not a takedown — including the tier you should not buy by accident.
Fastmail is the incumbent we respect most. Independent, profitable, no advertising business reading your mail, and a web client that is faster than anything Google ships. If you are choosing between them and us, you are choosing between two products that both take email seriously.
The detail that catches people out
Fastmail's Business Basic tier is €4/user/month and looks like the obvious starting point. It does not include IMAP or SMTP. It also gives 6 GB per user and only shared addresses on your domain. If you want to use Apple Mail, Thunderbird or any third-party client, the entry point is Business Standard at €6/user/month (€5 annual).
We mention it because the whole reason people buy hosted email on a custom domain is usually to use it from a client they already like. Buying Basic and discovering that is a bad afternoon.
For contrast: IMAP and SMTP are included on every FounderMail plan, including the free one. We don't gate protocols, because gating the exit is how you end up with customers who stay out of friction rather than preference.
Pricing side by side
| Fastmail Business Standard | FounderMail Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Model | Per user | Per account |
| Price | €6/user/mo (€5 annual) | $12/mo ($120/yr) |
| 3 addresses | ~€18/mo | $12/mo |
| 10 addresses | ~€60/mo | $12/mo |
| Storage | 60 GB per user | 25 GB pooled |
| IMAP / SMTP | Included | Included |
Note the storage row honestly: Fastmail gives 60 GB per user, we give 25 GB pooled across the account. At three real humans Fastmail is giving you far more space for the money. If your team keeps decades of attachments, that matters more than the monthly difference.
Where Fastmail is better
- The mail client. Twenty-five years of refinement, excellent search, first-rate keyboard handling, and mobile apps that are actually good. Ours is new.
- Calendars and contacts. Proper CalDAV and CardDAV. We host mail and nothing else.
- Storage per person, as above.
- Track record. They have survived acquisitions, outages and two decades of Google. We launched this year. That is a real reason to prefer them and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Where we are better
- Mail organised around customers. Every message from a person, across every inbox in the account, in one timeline. Fastmail organises around mailboxes, like every other mail host, because that is what mail hosts do.
- Your product's data beside the thread. Plan, MRR, signup date and user id pushed from your own app through the link API, rendered next to their mail.
- Cost past a handful of addresses. Per-user pricing punishes teams that need more addresses than people — and shared inboxes, aliases and per-project addresses are addresses, not people.
- A free tier with real protocols. Fastmail has a trial; we have a permanent free plan with IMAP and SMTP on it.
How to choose
Buy Fastmail if you want the best mail client and calendar for a small number of real people, and you are happy organising around mailboxes.
Use us if the thing you keep running into is that your company's conversation with one customer is scattered across three inboxes, and you want it in one place without adding a second vendor on top of your mail host.
Both of us speak IMAP on every plan we would recommend, so whichever you pick you can leave with your mail. That is the point of the protocol.
Start free — no card, unlimited inboxes.
Fastmail pricing verified against fastmail.com/pricing in September 2026. Check it before deciding.