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Topicbox – FastMail’s new product for teams
- nanoniano 9y agoWhat they have to launch is a cheaper service. Their prices are laughable, although I can understand that, given they have no competition.
- lettergram 9y agoIMO it's not unreasonable. <$400 / month for 200 employees seems fair, especially given their standard email service is $3 / month / user. It's also for Enterprise, which typically has a higher price tag.
- nanoniano 9y agoI meant their regular service. $5 per account is completely unreasonable, I don't understand where the money goes. (I talk about the $5 plan because it's the same as the $3 plan, but you can use your own domain, which doesn't really make it more complicated for them to give you service or anything)
- systems 9y agounreasonable compared to who? or to what? the comparable offer from google is also $5
- castis 9y agoI gladly pay them $5 a month because hosting my own email server sucked and I'd much rather pay someone else who does it well.
- brongondwana 9y agoStaff to run things well and develop new features, plus redundancy. We have roughly a 10/1 ratio of disk usage to quota by the time you count RAID overhead, local and offsite replica plus backups, and that includes really high end SSDs for indexes and recent emails. Sure we could half-arse things and run cheaper, but that's not the business we're in. We provide a high quality product, and we truly believe we're worth it. No apologies for that price, it's quite reasonable for the value we provide.
- ams6110 9y agoFully agree. Fastmail is one of the very few "cloud" services I think is worth paying for (as an individual -- obviously businesses find value in e.g. AWS). I do the annual payment of $50 which effectively is two free months out of the year.
- hueving 9y ago> it's quite reasonable for the value we provide. The rest of your post is fine, but don't say this when pitching your product because value is entirely in the eye of the customer.
- brongondwana 9y agoYou're right - people who don't see that value won't be our customers, and I should have said "quite reasonable for the product that we provide" or similar instead. We have made a conscious choice that we aren't going to chase after the really price sensitive customer. We're OK with not having those customers. If price is your ONLY deciding factor, then FastMail isn't for you, because we'll never be the cheapest option. You can't compete with free if you don't have another funding source to subsidise the product. And we don't: all our income comes from selling our service, so we can't compete on price alone. We have to compete on quality, features and execution. I wound up moving this paragraph deep into the blog post because it wasn't the point of the post - but it is one of my key driving principles: "Our goal is to solve your email needs as quickly as possible so you can get on with everything else in your life." We don't want to keep our customers' eyeballs on our site longer than the minimum required to achieve their goals.
- bachmeier 9y agoI've had a lot of people ask me why I pay for email service (I use Fastmail). There are many free options available. Email is important to my work, and the free options are not at all what I'm looking for. If you want to play the premium price game, you better be able to back it up with a good customer experience, and Fastmail does. That's why you see so many positive comments in any discussion of email.
- tcfunk 9y agoYou'd be hard-pressed to find a VPS to rent and host your own email server for much less than $5/mo. And that's just an empty server! Now you've gotta set up the email software and hope to god people get your emails since they aren't coming from a reputable source.
- zimpenfish 9y agoYou can get a Scaleways machine for €2.99 a month which will handle a reasonable volume of email. BUT. The ongoing faff and arsing about and maintenance isn't fun. If I didn't have many, many accounts for me and other people on my servers, I'd have migrated to FastMail a long time ago.
- tcfunk 9y agoNever heard of Scaleway...those prices seem to beat the pants of DigitalOcean. Might have to look into that, thank you for mentioning.
- ams6110 9y agoThey (Scaleway) are ARM machines, no?
- cknight 9y agoDepends which offer you are looking at. They also have x86 VPS options using Atom chips.
- zimpenfish 9y agoYou can still run mail servers on them though. You might have to compile stuff up for yourself if your distro doesn't support it but I've found Arch to be pretty good in this respect.
- cyberpunk 9y agoThat's all fine, but then you're one hardware failure away from not being able to receive email. I'm working on a guide on how to setup a replicated fault tolerant email cluster (galera/dsync) here [1] -- feedback appreciated. This costs far more than something like fastmail, however. Depending on your situation you might value cost over peace of mind. 1: https://medium.com/@cyberpunk_networks/nsa-proof-your-email-2017-edition-f11a89697722 https://medium.com/@cyberpunk_networks/nsa-proof-your-email-...
- lettergram 9y agoAs a paying user, I find it's more than reasonable. Although, I do wish they'd seperate their calendar portion to another app - their email service is superb for the price. Else, I'd have to pay $5 / month minimum, to host my own -_-
- brongondwana 9y agoWe're not interested in a race to the bottom. We provide a high quality service and we charge enough to provide that service. We're clear about our values: https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/13/fastmails-values/ https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/13/fastmails-values/ and we unashamedly charge enough money to keep building a good service and providing a good service.
- nanoniano 9y agoI disagree. You charge a very high price for a service because you know you have no competition, like Apple does. You have your right to do so. But that's the way it is.
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoNot only does FastMail have a lot of competition, they have a lot of cheap competition. Bear in mind, they not only have to beat companies like Slack here which offer their service free to a certain extent, but old mailing list classics like Google Groups as well.
- calcifer 9y agoReally? $0.1 per day ($0.16 w/ custom domain) for high quality, privacy oriented email is a high price? I would gladly pay quadruple that if I had to.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- fbnlsr 9y agoMy personal problem is that I'm way too deeply engaged with Google now. I was fortunate enough to get a Google Apps account back when it was a free service, and I have been providing all the Google services for me and all my family for free for several years. Fastmail looks absolutely incredible and I've never heard the slightest bad thing about them, but it'd cost me $250/month to get the same level of service I get now for free. :/
- interfixus 9y agoFastmail has plenty of competition. Some of it with markedly lower prices, but one of it with a comparable quality and smoothness of operation. Where I live, $5 will buy you a sort of decent loaf of bread or about 3.5 liters of gasoline or cup of coffe out on the town if you are lucky. I happily shoot Fastmail that small amount every thirty days for a neat, stable, well thought out product which saves me all the joyless hassle of running things myself.
- geomark 9y agoHow is fastmail's spam filtering? I've been using Zoho mail for a while and like it except their spam filtering is quite poor.
- sitepodmatt 9y agoRe: Zoho, when things go wrong expect days of issues and no real replies, but green status pages due to old school sharding behind the scenes (only small number of customers effected so well stay green, I.e. no mail for three days). Premium customer? Call their support number, yep a voicemail, a callback? not within 24hrs. Terrible company. Sloppy products. Dont ever recommend this to clients, even if the client is a cheapstake and 5 free accounts appeals just say 'not on my name'
- ams6110 9y agoI wanted to try Zoho about a year ago, but couldn't even get through their sign-up process without errors that prevented completion. Never went back. First impressions and all.
- bauerd 9y agoZoho Mail? Don't even get me started … We had so many laughable problems with that service. Like being unable to remove a user account because the whole management UI was just plain broken. We tried removing the account for I don't know how many months. When I let them know about the issue I got a response asking for a scan of the CEO's ID card. Finally they fixed it but then the login broke. When I tried logging in to the management UI, all I got was a redirect back to the login screen. Hell I could go on. Moved everything off to AWS WorkMail and learned my lesson.
- mxuribe 9y agoI'm always a big fan of org. wikis...but the challenge is some users slack off on creating/posting content...but this topicbox seems like users can simply draft/send an email, and bam its content for a sort of "wiki". This is a great idea, even if only for the low curve of easily "creating" organizational content! Kudos to fastmail!
- systems 9y agoi find topicbox to sound more like a supercharged mailing-list personally i think mailing-list is the most important communication tool for team work, and i think more organization need to use them sadly the only mailing-list software for windows/exchange i found was commercial, expensive and will be a hard sell ...
- brongondwana 9y agoThis is exactly why we build topicbox! We like mailing lists, and we want an archive which is useful.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ams6110 9y agoWell I was going to say I don't really see how this is much different from e.g. Google Groups. Groups messages go into an archive that is searchable/readable by new members. But just having a message archive isn't really that helpful unless it can be organized further, and that's where it breaks down -- the job of organizing the group archive has all the same problems of keeping the team wiki up to date: its easy to get behind, and the content grows stale or hard to use.
- e12e 9y agoUnless there are any alternative interfaces I'm unaware of, Google group's biggest problem isn't its feature set, but its godawful interface... It feels like someone that never heard of usenet took a look at early version of phpbb and proclaimed: we can do worse!
- cpr 9y agoWould there be any way to turn this into a Zendesk-like solution, using threads for each support inquiry, and assignments of some sort? We're happy Fastmail email users, and can almost live with email for support, and barely use any Zendesk features other than assignments, internal notes, and various views. But those three simple ZD features we do use are critical.
- brongondwana 9y agoI pinged the product lead (and told her to get a hacker news account of her own!) Answer: we've definitely talked about how it would be great as a lightweight client management system for a freelancer or consulting firm. We're definitely looking ahead to possible integrations, too! --- From myself - we talk a lot about "teams" with Topicbox, but it's really any group of poeple who share a common interest or responsibility. One market we've identified is homeowners' associations or "body corporates" as they're often called here in Australia. They have membership turnover as people buy and sell, and they have long running projects with a need to keep history. Finally, they consist of people who use different mail services, because unlike a business where everyone is on the same solution, a set of homeowners share nothing other than the locality in which they live. So a heterogeneous system like Topicbox with archivable topics and searchable history is ideal.
- wyc 9y agoI can't wait to see products like these spawn brand new professions like Email Summarizers to get the gist out of long threads, Department Librarians to organize and catalog discussions and events, and Communications Coordinators to train teams on more effective patterns of e-communication. PMs unwittingly take all these roles today, but these tools will surely unlock further specialization.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mkempe 9y agoMany moons ago I worked at a consultancy that was struggling with knowledge sharing across continents and hundreds of projects. I suggested three paths: a company-wide search engine that would return results across all project files (Google used to sell such a solution, in a box); a part-time librarian role in each project team to make sure project documents were correctly named, the latest version was stored on the central file server, and they knew how to reach out to other project librarians; and finally a one-day after-action review workshop for every single project team as part of project closure. Plus a few additional activities for project teams and suggestions for long-term project staffing systems. Some of it was done, very satisfyingly; some of it we didn't get around to trying. Then the dotcom meltdown happened.
- EGreg 9y agoAren't many businesses going to be leery of sending their group emails to yet another external domain to be archived? Where are the turnkey open source email servers after 40 years? It seems no one solved SPAM in a way that's compatible with sending out your own, but for receiving and internal stuff like this?
- azinman2 9y agoThis just a mailing list, right? What am I missing?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- grok2 9y agoSeems like mailing list with a nicer UI that allows for searching etc.....
- Kadin 9y agoI think it has a nice UI, and presumably it's also a hosted solution. But fundamentally it seems to have many of the same features that Mailman et al have had for decades. Good on them if they can make mailinglist archives great again, though. I think they're an underappreciated resource, and maybe a slick interface and some rebranding is just what they need.
- azinman2 9y agoThe naming and the copy about team communication made me think it’s more than it is. Not suggesting it has low utility, although I wish it did more than add search to a hosted mailing list... google groups has search (in an old interface). Seems like there’s a lot of opportunity to fix emails weaknesses here if the product is truly focused on topics and teams.
- j605 9y agoTheir FAQ even mentions migrating from listserv as an option by talking with their team.
- _RPM 9y agoFastMail really needs a UX team and graphic designer.
- ngrilly 9y agoCould this be considered an alternative to Discourse?