FranklyMail vs Migadu

Both of us decided that charging per person is the wrong way to price email. Where we parted company is what to charge for instead.

Migadu picked throughput. Their tiers are defined by messages per day — 200 in and 20 out on Micro, 1,000 in and 100 out on Mini — and storage is deliberately soft, with no hard quota, so your mail will not bounce because a mailbox filled up. That is a genuinely kind design decision and we do not match it.

We picked storage. Ten gigabytes pooled across everybody is included, more is $0.40 per gigabyte per year, and there is no tier that depends on predicting how much mail you will send next year. Both models are honest. They are bets on different things being scarce.

The headline numbers are $9 against $19, and on that row Migadu Micro is more expensive than us. But the row that decides it is usually the one underneath.

Twenty outgoing messages a day is the Micro allowance, and for five people sharing a domain that is four each. One ordinary Tuesday — a few client replies, a thread with an accountant, three messages to a supplier — uses it up. The tier a small working team lands on is Mini, at $90 a year.

So the comparison a team should run is $9 against $90, not $9 against $19. If you are one person who mostly receives, Micro at $19 may well be the better product, and the extra ten dollars buys you storage you never have to think about.

Our sending IPs are new. Nobody hands a new mail operator the right to send at volume, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either not warming up or not telling you.

So there is a global cap on how much mail leaves this service in a day. It is not a per-account tier and it is not part of the plan you buy — it is a warm-up ladder, it starts low, and a human raises it one rung a week after reading the previous week’s delivery metrics. It takes roughly six weeks, and it cannot be compressed by working harder at it.

While that ladder is running, our total outbound allowance across every customer is tighter than a single Migadu Micro account’s. That is a real disadvantage today and it would be dishonest to put it in the small print. It is also exactly why the mail that does leave here lands in inboxes: the alternative to warming up slowly is a fresh IP block with a reputation nobody wants to inherit.