A few people have asked recently whether the world really needs another email service. It's a fair question — there are about a dozen of them now, including some very good ones. Here's the honest answer.
We didn't start Mailcedar to take on Gmail. We started it because the three of us were already running our own mail servers for personal use, our friends and family kept asking if they could just use ours, and at some point Jamil said "we should just make this a real thing." That's the whole origin story. There was no business plan.
Three years later, what's kept us going is that there's a kind of customer that none of the bigger options seem to want. They're not the kind of customer who reads HackerNews and wants to know which cipher we use for inbound TLS (we'll tell you, but you don't have to ask). They're not corporate. They're not paranoid. They're just people who have been on Gmail since 2007 and have started to feel weird about it.
They tell us things like:
I just want an inbox that doesn't feel like it's trying to sell me something every time I open it.
I switched my mom over and her email finally makes sense to her again.
I don't need the AI summarizer. I'd rather just read the email.
None of those are technically demanding. None of them require us to invent anything. They just require that someone build an email service that is willing to be small and stay small.
The thing we won't do
The reason a lot of email services drift toward the surveillance model is that they took outside money and now have to find a way to grow 40% a year forever. We didn't, so we don't.
We will probably never have a hundred thousand customers, and the math works out fine. Six people, a few hundred dollars a month in server costs, a sustainable margin, and the people running it can afford to live in Vancouver without selling anything weird to do it. That's the company.
It also means we can refuse things. We won't add an AI assistant that reads your mail to "help" you write replies. We won't add a smart inbox that uses your behaviour to decide what's important. We won't add a marketing tool that lets businesses send you "transactional" mail that's actually a sales pitch. We're not even going to add a referral program, because every referral program in the world ends up rewarding the most aggressive sharing.
None of those decisions cost us money, because we never had the kind of investor who would expect them.
The thing we'll keep doing
The boring parts: keeping the servers up, answering the help email, fixing the Sieve editor when somebody finds a way to break it, and writing a year-in-review post every January with our numbers in it. We'll publish our security audits. We'll post our incident postmortems. We'll continue to be small and unsexy and pleasant to deal with.
If that sounds like the kind of email service you'd want behind your inbox, we're at mailcedar.com/signup. The free tier is free. Tell your mom.
— Maya