I’ve been using ProtonMail on my andyburns.co domain since 2018 before Civicopilot was a thing. And then I added the civicopilot.com to it as well.
They don’t sell, scan or invade your privacy. I’m on their Mail Plus plan at $4 a month, no complaints.
But when I set up OS Ticket back in May, I needed a plain SMTP mailbox to pull messages in. Proton doesn’t offer that because of their encryption model, so I went looking for something else.
That search led me to Migadu. And now I moved over the civicopilot.com domain over to their email hosting.
I’ve been impressed, mostly because they take email freedom, open internet principles, and user control seriously. Their about page is worth a read to see where they are coming from: https://migadu.com/about/.
If you’re a nonprofit and not using Google Workspace for Nonprofits (which is free), or you don’t qualify for it, or you value the ethics/privacy side of email, you might be wondering what else is out there.
Here’s what I like.
Migadu doesn’t make you pay per mailbox. Most providers do. That can range from $7-14 dollars a month for users who only need email occasionally.
Pricing per address is like charging $7 per folder on your local folder system, regardless of whether it’s empty. You already paid for your domain. You already own the full address space. Why rent individual addresses from someone else?
Here’s the deal:
Migadu’s approach is much simpler:
- Create as many addresses as you want
- Pay for storage and sending, not the number of addresses
- A minimalistic control panel without features you didn’t ask for
Their $90/year plan gives you 100 sends a day and 1,000 inbound messages. And they offer a 50% discount for nonprofits. And it has all the features of aliases and forwarding too.
So there’s really no cost objections left here and no catches. I like that Migadu happens to be one of the few providers pushing back on that old model and reminding people that email doesn’t have to be controlled by a handful of giants.