Best Email Subscriptions: Hey vs Fastmail vs Proton Mail

Here's an uncomfortable truth: you probably spend more time in your email client than any other app, and you're using a product whose primary revenue model involves reading your messages to serve you ads. Gmail is free because you're the product. Your conversations about vacation plans become travel ads. Your receipt from the pharmacy becomes health supplement targeting. It's brilliant business and slightly unsettling privacy.

The alternative -- paying actual money for email -- sounds absurd until you think about it for five seconds. You pay for music streaming, video streaming, cloud storage, and meditation apps. But the communication tool you depend on for literally everything? Nah, the ad-supported one is fine.

We spent three months using Hey, Fastmail, and Proton Mail as our primary email accounts. Here's what happened when we started paying for something we'd taken for granted.

The Three Philosophies of Email

Before diving into features, it's worth understanding that these three services represent fundamentally different visions for what email should be:

Hey: The Opinionated Revolutionary

Hey, created by Basecamp (now 37signals), launched in 2020 with the audacity to suggest that everything we know about email is wrong. And honestly? They might be right about most of it.

The core innovation is the Imbox (not a typo) -- a curated feed of only the emails you've chosen to see. New senders hit the Screener first, where you decide thumbs-up or thumbs-down before they ever reach your inbox. Newsletters go to The Feed, which displays them like a reading app. Receipts and transactional emails go to Paper Trail, searchable but out of sight.

After three months, here's what we concluded: Hey is transformative if your email problem is volume and noise. The Screener alone eliminated roughly 60% of the messages that previously cluttered our inbox. The Feed turned newsletters from guilt-inducing unread counts into enjoyable reading sessions. The lack of an open/read tracking blocked roughly 40 tracking pixels per day that we never knew existed.

The downsides are real, though. Hey doesn't support IMAP or POP3, which means no third-party email clients. You use Hey's apps or nothing. If you leave Hey, migrating your email archive is possible but clunky. At $99/year ($8.25/month), it's the most expensive option. And the opinionated design means there's no undo if you disagree with their philosophy -- there's no way to get a traditional inbox view.

Fastmail: The Refined Workhorse

If Hey is the rebel architect who redesigned the house, Fastmail is the master craftsman who made the existing house perfect. It does everything Gmail does, but faster, without ads, with better privacy, and with an attention to detail that makes power users weep with joy.

Fastmail has been around since 1999 -- predating Gmail by five years -- and the institutional knowledge shows. IMAP support is flawless. Custom domain setup takes under 5 minutes. The search is instantaneous. The web interface is clean and fast in a way that Gmail stopped being around the time it added its fifteenth feature nobody asked for.

Standout features: Masked Email (generates unique email addresses for each service you sign up for, so if one gets compromised, you disable that alias without affecting anything else), Snooze (before Gmail copied it), the best custom domain experience of any email service, and CalDAV/CardDAV support that makes it a genuine Google Workspace replacement for individuals.

At $5/month (Standard) or $8/month (Professional with 50GB and full custom domain features), Fastmail is the Goldilocks option. Not as radical as Hey, not as privacy-obsessed as Proton, but arguably the best all-around email experience you can buy. It's the Honda Civic of email: reliable, efficient, and quietly excellent.

Proton Mail: The Privacy Fortress

Proton Mail was built by scientists from CERN and MIT with one goal: make email so private that even Proton themselves can't read your messages. They succeeded. End-to-end encryption means your emails are encrypted on your device before they leave, and decrypted only on the recipient's device (if they're also using Proton) or via a password-protected link.

Based in Switzerland, Proton benefits from some of the world's strongest privacy laws. They've survived legal challenges from foreign governments, published transparency reports showing they physically cannot comply with mass surveillance requests, and open-sourced their clients for independent auditing.

The free tier is genuinely usable: 1GB storage, 150 messages/day. The Mail Plus plan ($3.99/month) adds 15GB, unlimited messages, custom domains, and encrypted calendar. The Proton Unlimited plan ($9.99/month) bundles VPN, cloud storage, password manager, and calendar -- essentially an entire privacy-focused productivity suite.

The trade-offs: Because of encryption, some features work differently. Search is limited to metadata (subject lines, sender addresses) unless you enable a bridge that indexes locally. The web interface, while improved significantly in 2025, still feels slower than Fastmail. And the encryption only provides full protection when emailing other Proton users -- messages to Gmail recipients are protected in transit but readable by Google once they arrive.

Our Recommendations

Choose Hey if: You're overwhelmed by email volume, want a fresh approach, don't need IMAP/third-party client support, and are willing to pay a premium for a genuinely different experience. Best for: newsletter addicts, people who get 100+ emails/day, anyone who says "I hate email" regularly.

Choose Fastmail if: You want the best traditional email experience, need custom domains and aliases, use third-party clients, and value speed and reliability. Best for: freelancers, small business owners, power users, and anyone migrating from Gmail who wants everything to "just work."

Choose Proton Mail if: Privacy is your top priority, you want an entire encrypted productivity suite, or you live in a jurisdiction where digital privacy is a serious concern. Best for: journalists, activists, privacy-conscious professionals, and anyone who's read one too many data breach headlines.

The Hidden Cost of "Free" Email

We estimated the value of data that free email services extract from a typical user: based on Google's per-user ad revenue and the granularity of email-derived targeting data, your Gmail inbox generates approximately $35-50/year in ad revenue. You're paying for Gmail -- just not with money.

At $3.99-8.25/month, paid email is a bargain when viewed as a privacy investment. And unlike a VPN (which only protects browsing), email privacy covers your most sensitive communications: financial statements, medical correspondence, personal conversations, and business discussions.

Track All Your Productivity Subscriptions

Email is just one of many productivity subscriptions fighting for your monthly budget. Between email, cloud storage, note-taking apps, calendar tools, and task managers, productivity subscriptions alone can hit $30-50/month. Subcut helps you see the full picture, track renewals, and decide which tools are earning their keep.