Fastmail's restructured tiers split mail and file storage across three plans

What Fastmail is now selling

Fastmail, the long-running independent paid email provider, has reorganized its offering into three plans — Basic, Standard and Professional — each with its own storage ceilings for mail and files. According to the pricing page, which reached the front page of Hacker News on 24 August 2026, mail, calendar and contacts storage is capped at 5 GB per user on Basic, 50 GB on Standard and 100 GB on Professional.

File storage is tracked as a separate quota rather than a shared pool: 1 GB per user on Basic, 10 GB on Standard and 50 GB on Professional. That split means a subscriber's documents and attachments live under a different limit from their mailbox, and the two do not appear to be interchangeable on the page as captured.

The plan comparison that circulated focuses on storage volumes and feature availability; the captured text does not spell out per-plan dollar amounts, so cost comparisons depend on the numbers shown at signup.

Where the feature lines are drawn

The core product is common to all three tiers. According to Fastmail's page, every plan includes ad-free, tracking-free email; Masked Email for hiding real addresses; many custom addresses on one account; a combined mobile app for mail, calendars and contacts; spam controls; rules for automatic sorting; shared calendars with invitations; contact management with VIP prioritization; migration tools from previous providers; admin tools for managing additional users; and support for JMAP, the modern email protocol Fastmail backs.

Notably, every tier also lets customers choose their primary data residency — the EU or the USA — which is unusual to see offered without an enterprise upsell.

The differences begin with the features power users tend to need. Use of your own domain (addresses of the form you@yourname), scheduled send, snooze for delaying messages, thread muting and access from third-party clients such as Outlook or iPhone Mail are all listed as not supported on Basic and supported on Standard and Professional. In practice, that confines Basic subscribers to Fastmail's own interfaces.

One capability sits at the top of the stack alone: email retention for legal compliance is available only on Professional, marking it as the plan aimed at businesses with record-keeping obligations.

What existing subscribers are watching

The page's traction on Hacker News indicates the restructuring is drawing attention from current customers, since changes to storage ceilings and feature gating can push people between plans. Someone whose usage leans on file storage, or who reads mail through a native client, may find that only the higher tiers fit how they already work. The captured page does not detail transition terms, grandfathering or migration paths for existing subscribers, so those specifics remain the open question for current users evaluating where they land.

Why it matters

Paid email is a small but strategically interesting market, and Fastmail has positioned itself as the privacy-focused alternative to ad-supported incumbents — no ads, no tracking, and a data residency choice on every tier. How a provider like this structures its plans signals where it expects revenue to come from: the gating of custom domains and third-party client access above the entry tier suggests the customers Fastmail most wants are the ones running personal domains and native mail apps.

For existing users, the practical stakes are concrete. Storage quotas that are split between mail and files change the arithmetic of long-term mailbox growth, and losing (or gaining) client access at a tier boundary can break established workflows. Anyone on an older arrangement will want to map their current usage against the new matrix before renewal.