Why our storage costs so little

The single question we get a lot

People ask us how we can offer 10 GB of storage on the free plan and reasonable storage amounts on the paid plans without losing money or planning to make the product worse once we have enough users. This is a fair thing to be suspicious and worried about, because for years the big email providers have trained everyone to believe that storage is expensive and that “free” always means you are the product. We figured we would explain how the math and costs work so we don’t have anything to hide. We would rather you understand the business than guess at it. In short, we get storage so cheap because we run off of Hetzner. They have spent the last three decades quietly building one of the most cost-efficient hosting services on the planet.

What is Hetzner

Hetzner is a German company that has been around since 1997, which means they have been renting out servers before AWS existed. They own and operate their own data center parks in Nuremberg, Falkenstein, and various other locations. They have a reputation in the developer community for being almost unreasonably cheap and affordable compared to the hyperscalers. The first time most people see their pricing, they assume it has to be low quality or a scam. When they actually try it out, they realize it’s neither of those things. It’s just what infrastructure costs when you’ve spent 30 years optimizing it instead of building a sales organization around it. Aster Mail’s encrypted storage lives on their storage box service in Falkenstein, Germany, which is also where we run the rest of our infrastructure.

Why their prices are so low

The reason their prices are so low is that Hetzner owns the buildings where their servers are located. That means they are not paying a markup to a colocation provider or leasing space in someone else’s facility.

They design and build all their servers themselves, which lets them strip out anything they do not need and avoid paying enterprise margins on parts they could spec themselves. Their German data centers have run entirely on hydropower since 2008, and their Finnish site has been on hydropower since it opened. That matters because renewable electricity in those regions is extremely cheap.

Cooling is another big thing that they focus on. Falkenstein and other locations are cold for most of the year. Hetzner cools their data centers with outside air around 98% of the time, which means they are not running large chillers 24/7 the way a data center in Virginia or Arizona has to do. Their average PUE sits around 1.13, which is excellent by industry standards and means almost every watt they pull from the grid is doing useful work instead of getting lost to overhead.

The last piece, and the one that truly matters most for a service like ours, is bandwidth. The hyperscalers make an enormous amount of money on egress fees by charging you every time the data leaves their network. That is how a lot of “cheap” cloud storage stops being cheap the moment anyone actually turns out to use it.

Hetzner Storage Boxes come with unlimited traffic, so we don’t get billed every time you open your inbox. We don’t have to bake that cost into your plan.

What this means for you

Your encrypted mail and attachments sit on a RAID array designed to survive many drive failures at once. It is cooled by the German weather and powered by hydroelectricity in a building owned and operated by the same company running the servers. The data is physically located in Germany, which puts it under GDPR and in a jurisdiction we picked on purpose rather than one we ended up in by accident. None of that is unusual for serious privacy-focused services, and it is the same kind of foundation that several of the providers you already know are built off of.

We are not subsidizing free accounts by betting on conversions, and we’re not running on borrowed money, hoping to figure out a sustainable business model in the future. The infrastructure is affordable, and we’d rather pass that through to you than mark it up to match what the bigger players charge.

If you’d like to read up on the more technical side of things, such as how our encryption works, you can visit our GitHub located here: https://github.com/Aster-Privacy. If you want truly private email, go ahead and grab an address and we’ll see you there.