Skip to content
FranklyMail
Comparison

FranklyMail vs Fastmail

Fastmail Family is $132 a year for up to six people. That is a fair price for a good product and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

The gap opens on a team. Fastmail Business Standard is $5 per user per month, so five people is $300 a year against our $9 — and a studio cannot honestly buy a family plan.

Their apps are better than ours. Ours is webmail and whatever IMAP or JMAP client you already like. That is the actual trade.

Get started, $9/yr Skip to the table

Side by side.

A year of email for you and four others. List prices, read off each provider’s own page on 12 August 2026.

FranklyMail vs Fastmail: annual cost and features for 5 people.
Per year, 5 peopleFranklyMailFastmail
Price per year, 5 people$9$132 on Family, up to 6
Same five people, on a business plan$9$300 — Standard, $5/user/mo
Pricing modelFlat, plus storage you useFlat up to 6 on Family, per user on Business
People includedUnlimited6 on Family, then billed per seat
Custom domainsUnlimitedYes, except on Business Basic
Storage10 GB pooled, then $0.40/GB/yr60 GB per person
IMAP, POP3, SMTPYesYes
JMAPYesYes
Sieve filtersYesYes
First-party iOS and Android appsNoYes
Calendar and contactsNoYes
Masked EmailNoYes

Fastmail Family is a good deal, and this page starts by saying so

$132 a year for six people is $22 each. For that you get a mail service run by people who have been doing it for over twenty years, apps that are genuinely nice to use every day, a calendar, contacts, and Masked Email — which is one of the better features anyone has shipped in this category.

If you are a household of up to six and any of that appeals, buy it. We would rather send you there than sell you something you will resent in a month. A comparison page that cannot name a competitor’s good plan is an advert wearing a table for a hat.

The honest gap at that size is $123 a year. Real money, but not life-changing money, and you are getting something concrete for it.

Where per-seat pricing comes back

Family is a family plan. A five-person studio is not a family, and buying a household plan for a company is the kind of thing that works right up until it does not. The plan a team is actually meant to buy is Business Standard, at $5 per user per month on an annual term — $300 a year for five people.

That is where the shape of the two products diverges. Our $9 does not move when you add the fifth person, or the tenth, because what costs a mail server money is storage and bandwidth, not headcount. Fastmail’s price moves with every hire, because per-seat pricing is measuring your company rather than your mail.

Both models are defensible. Theirs pays for apps, a calendar, a support team and two decades of engineering. Ours pays for a mail server and the person keeping its IPs clean. Which one you want depends entirely on whether you open the apps.

The apps, plainly

Fastmail’s apps are better than ours. We do not have apps. You get webmail and any IMAP or JMAP client you already like — Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Mimestream, whatever is on your phone.

For a lot of this audience that is not a downgrade, because they were never going to use a provider’s app anyway; they have had the same mail client configured since 2014 and they would like the new account to appear in it. If that is you, the app difference costs you nothing.

If you live in a provider’s app, read your mail on a phone all day, and care how the search feels, it costs you a lot, and $123 a year is a perfectly rational price to pay for it.

What Fastmail does better.

Every comparison page on the internet skips this section. Here is ours.

  • The apps. iOS, Android and web, all better than a standards-based webmail, and it is not close.
  • Masked Email — per-signup addresses that are actually pleasant to create and kill.
  • Calendar and contacts, in the same account, working properly. We do not build those at all.
  • They designed JMAP. We implement it; they wrote the specification.
  • Over twenty years of continuous operation, and a support team with people on it.
  • 60 GB per person, against our 10 GB pooled across everybody.

Stay on Fastmail if…

  • You use the apps every day, and the way search and swipe feel matters to you.
  • Masked Email is part of how you sign up for things now.
  • You want calendar and contacts in the same place as your mail.
  • You are six people or fewer, and $132 is not the constraint.
  • You want a company with two decades of history holding your archive.

Come to us if…

  • You are a team, and $300 a year to run five mailboxes reads wrong to you.
  • You already read mail in a client you chose yourself.
  • Your calendar is somewhere else and always was.
  • You want more addresses without a conversation about seats.

Fair questions.

Isn’t Fastmail Family already cheap enough?
For six people, $132 is fine — that is $22 each for a better-looking product than ours. Per person we are $1.80. If saving $123 a year matters to you, we are here; if it does not, their apps are worth the difference and you should buy them.
Do you have iOS and Android apps?
No. Webmail, and any IMAP or JMAP client you like. We would rather ship one good web panel and support the open protocols properly than ship three mediocre apps.
Do you support JMAP like Fastmail does?
We support JMAP. Fastmail authored the specification and their implementation is the reference one, so “like Fastmail” is doing some work in that question — but yes, a JMAP client will connect.
Can I move my Fastmail archive across?
Yes, over IMAP, the same way you would move it anywhere. Fastmail has never locked anyone in and is unusually good about that — it is one of the reasons they are worth comparing against honestly.

Other comparisons

Nine dollars. One year. Every mailbox you need.

30-day refund, and cancel in one click.

Get started, $9/yr