HEY for my email, but there’s a surprise twist: I’m also sticking with Fastmail. Hear me out.
I was initially disappointed with the implementation of custom domains in HEY. You can read the whole almost-rant here, but the short version is that I thought I was going to lose both my @hey.com address and my access to HEY World for quick blogging. And it would cost me $20 more per year for the priviledge. If I wanted to keep my address and HEY World, I’d have to pay for both accounts at something like $199/year. That wasn’t something I was interested in. I later learned that there is a discount for current users. This put the total at a much more reasonable $123/year for custom domains, my old address, HEY World, and the additional features of “HEY for Domains”.
HEY with the discount on HEY for Domains made more sense, but didn’t allay my original concerns about switching everything to HEY; the biggest being lack of standard IMAP access to my email. Dumping my most important account into a proprietary service still gives me hives and I’m not sure I’ll ever be comfortable with it, so I did the math on keeping both my Fastmail and HEY accounts.
This means that if I keep both HEY for You and Fastmail, I’m paying $25 more per year, but I get everything:
- Great email experience (HEY)
- My @hey.com address (HEY)
- Blogging with HEY World (HEY)
- IMAP access to my email (Fastmail)
- Inherent backups (Fastmail, but email will remain in both accounts)
- Keep all history (Fastmail)
- Fall back in case the HEY folks lose their minds or just go away.
- Additional user for $30/year (Fastmail, my wife isn’t interested in using HEY)
The only thing missing would be the “Team” features of HEY for Domains, which I don’t need.
It seems I’ve been able to rationalize keeping both services and thereby avoiding the need to actually make a decision ????. I have until May 30th to decide if this works.
Is email worth $150/year? To me it is. Am I missing anything?