That promise is what justified their slightly higher prices. With it broken, I have no reason not to transfer to a less expensive registrar. So that I’ve now done, and Gandi can try to win me back next year.
Yes - when the first wave of emails hit EU users several months ago, I complained on HN that I'd be fine with paying for GandiMail as long as I had 6 months notice or whatever.
The email I got today was pretty clear and no-BS, it says flat out that pricing changes are effective in 30 days for "all our existing services and the new Mailbox service" - price hikes aren't exactly fun, but my domain is registered out for a few years already and I'm using their email service for free... so is 30-day notice of a pricing increase _truly_ only 30 days notice? Not really, not for a vendor whom I only pay annually in advance.
Notably the existing, free GandiMail service stays up until November which is the part I was worried about. So this seems fine to me, I am happy to become a paying customer for email and they've made this easy by giving me plenty of time to onboard. Domain registry fees are already cheap, I don't really care about paying a little more to keep my domain. For my TLD it looks like prices are going up the equivalent of 60 cents per month.
I have been freeloading on GandiMail for several years and it's been great. I am happy to pay $4/mo for a standard inbox (at least while I shop around) especially if they are upgrading their product. Currently GandiMail's MFA scheme is pretty crappy/broken so I am excited to see what I'll be able to get in return for my money after they complete their changes.
It's not cool they are seemingly terminating a service I've already paid for. I say seemingly because their FAQ pressures you to opt-in to their new mail service as soon as possible and is vague on whether or not GandiMail will remain usable after November. That's BS to me; I'll transfer out even if it means paying more elsewhere.
You were already paying $2/mo for one of the "legacy" GandiMail premium 50 GB mailboxes? Yeah I can see how this looks much worse from that perspective. Your price is going to triple if you switch to the new premium mailbox.
Since I've only been paying for domain registration while using email for free, I feel that I can't complain as much, at least not in good faith.
Still, both the freebies and the paying customers get 6 months to decide which is all I can really ask for. GandiMail has plenty of room for improvement so as long as they can justify the cost increase, I'll consider staying.
I think we as customers have to manage expectations and at least let the vendor process their changes before making our decisions. That's what the 6-month period is for. If thousands of customers take flight immediately after the announcement, the rest of us might end up with a lesser service than we otherwise would've. It has to be subsidized somehow, clearly domain registration fees weren't doing the job.
Probably no reason, they said forwards will remain free. Hopefully that includes aliases as well, I've got a wildcard alias that is awesome to use.
How do you know they're adding Sieve support? The email just says "Better anti-spam"
The email also says "Stronger email server security" which I hope means they are fixing their MFA scheme - I've sent an email to their new support address to confirm this.
These docs look like they apply to the legacy mailboxes, check the article about MFA and you'll see how limited it is. This is the biggest thing I hope they fix with the new system.
In my Gandi portal I don't yet have an option to switch to "new" GandiMail. I figure their docs aren't updated yet either. Your legacy mailbox probably already supports Sieve.
My only experience with Gandi was awful. Bought a bunch of domains from them after they were praised here on HN, was assured that WHOIS privacy is enabled by default and without any extra fees.
Looked up the WHOIS records a minute later, and my phone number, name and email were all there. Those were .com, .org and .net domains.
I think on porkbun they explicitly tell you that some domains like .com do not have the option of enabling WHOIS privacy. So more likely this has something to do with the registrar and not gandi themselves.
Same for my two .re domains. They explicitly show toggle buttons for „email“ and „contact info“ guards and I enabled those. But when you look in the fine print, .re domains cannot hide contact info.
… and at the same time have you seen what most modern startups spend on cloud?
Price tolerance in this industry is grossly out of whack vs what things actually cost. Certain businesses are permitted to print money and nobody bats an eye (cloud, hosted data analytics, marketing, hipster web shit) while other things are expected to be free or absurdly cheap and people freak out otherwise.
Everyone knows pricing and cost expectations are never rational but they’re particularly ridiculous in software and SaaS.
They mostly phased-out the "no bullshit" slogan from all of their branding with the v5 migration in 2018. It went from being in the homepage's <title> and the first thing you see on the homepage[1] and in the header at the top of every page to being just a tiny link under "About Us" in the homepage's footer[2].
I get phasing it out, to be more "business friendly" or whatever; but doing it at the same time as the big v5 UI and accounts overhaul... it seemed to me to be an admission that the fancy new Javascript UI was bullshit.
I received the announcement email today. I understand and appreciate them offering the email service for free for many years. It's a lot of work and I was always wondering how they manage to offer email hosting for free.
Free is a marketing gimmick. It was never free but included in the domain package = domain registration + dns hosting + email boxes. The domain prices were generally higher than some concurrents. Now all of a sudden the domains see a price hike of 20-40% and each basic mail box that was included costs 57€ VAT included. So if you use the mail box this is essentially x3 or worse on the price. God forbid you used two mailboxes.
Existing customers will retain the free service for renewals done for the next month until they shut it down, and even then the cost of the new email service is a fraction of what you pay for Microsofts or Google custom domain emails.
I have a mailbox there for my domain so I hope they can introduce some easy way to just pre-pay for a longer period.
Their premium email service will be $5.99/mo going forward. The equivalent Exchange Online plan is $4.80/mo in year 1 (or $4 with 12mo commitment), then additional $12/yr for the custom domain i.e. $5.80/mo in year 2 - that's cheaper than Gandi?
Where did you find pricing? I found the notification about the changes to email a little suspect, it's basically just thrown in as a comment in the middle of the email I got. No info on the product seems to be available, no pricing, no nothing, just it will be available in a month.
I'd really hate to move domains and email again, I just moved everything a year ago.
Because I moved just before things started to go down hill. They were the cheapest, people seemed reasonably happy with their services and they had the features I wanted.
My problem was that not only did Google changed my price from free to way to expensive, but my DNS provider closed at the same time, so I needed to migrate both things at the same time. Pretty annoying.
When I was preparing to flee free google apps for domains during the recent kerfuffle, the cheapest overall really was Exchange Online (it's a basic email-only option). For a single user and single domain, it's just $56 a year.
Next best was proton mail (seems it's a bit cheaper now, $48/yr)
Zoho Mail seems like a pretty cheap deal. $1.25/user/month 1yr commitment for their 10GB/user email + calendar + contacts support according to the website. It says it can do Exchange ActiveSync and IMAP for connecting. This is currently my target for migrating my few email accounts.
I'd love to hear arguments for another service that's cheaper than that for just a few accounts. I don't really want/need all the extra document collaboration tools other services provide and I definitely don't want yet another Google/Microsoft account.
Ah you're correct, I just quickly entered Gandi's email page and saw the 0.35 eur a month price (linked to current "old" service) but didn't go through the linked price-list.
That does suck, it's not really a huge amount but a tad much for _just_ email (compared to Google Apps or MS365).
FWIW I've been a customer of Gandi.net for something like a decade now with a number of domains and many email accounts. This morning is the very first email I received from them on this (at 0025 EST this morning). I got no message about any previous email changes either. And my domain admin contact is not uniform either, email accounts there are across four different services including theirs, MXroute and GSuite. Not a spam filter issue. So yes, this feels pretty sudden here. That may or may not have been some sort of further screwup on their part, just a data point that notifications have not been uniform.
You’re right, there is one month of warning; I’d misread July for June. If I could I’d just edit out that complaint as the timing is secondary to their deceptive messaging around domain registration price increases.
The dark pattern seems to have worked as many here are still discussing only the mail hosting announcement in which the change to their core service was buried.
I haven't downvoted you but making a blanket statement like this is unfair. Some companies are founded explicitly to provide a more ethical product or service. If they don't market themselves based on their unique selling point, they'll either go out of business or be bought out by their less ethical competitors who can compete on price. Such is the nature of capitalism.
The text in the link was sent to Gandi users via email today, although they purposefully buried the significant domain registration price increases with the GandiMail bs text.
The actual price increases are listed here[0].
For example, currently a .com domain can be renewed for $17.75/year (tax inclusive - I personally renewed a .com domain for the maximum of 4 years tonight). After the increase this will be $23.99/year (26% increase).
I've been a long time (sometime prior to 2007) Gandi customer and ignored previous discussion concerns[1], but this will be the last time I renew my domains with Gandi. The v4->v5 user interface change was painful at first, but they have fixed most of those UX issues - at least as far as the DNS support, which is all I really use. But their service is definitely not worth the premium.
They got me, I thought the price hikes were specifically for things I didn't care about, because of all of the gandimail stuff. Without HN I wouldn't have even noticed.
Looking at my last invoice, I paid ~£26/year for a .info domain. If I'm reading this right, it's now ~£36/yr.
Aren't domain registrations ultimately kept by the registry (e.g. Verisign for .com) not the registrar. If you transfer your domain, you don't forfeit far out expiry dates?
Better check this at the registry. I've noticed that this group of companies has a new policy regarding domain renewal: let the client pay at date X and update the registry just within hours before the domain expires.
Paying 9 nine years in advance might just result in the obligation of this company to renew the domain 9 times for you, unless you move out of course....
Dark patterns is becoming the standard.
I can see how for some people, it might make sense to pay the higher prices if they also get value from their email services and/or DNS hosting.
I run my own name server on my VPS so I chose Gandi because they provide free secondary name servers – but then discovered that their secondary name servers don’t support NOTIFY (or IXFR). Instead they make an AXFR transfer on a fixed schedule – that’s too slow for Let’s Encrypt DNS authentication.
So far, I’ve stayed with them because I don’t have many domains registered and I appreciate their commitment to security of user accounts: the ability to lock domains, and MFA support. These are now standard but I also have my account to set up to only allow logins from various IP network ranges.
Edit: Also, their web interface for managing domains was intuitive and easy-to-use (no dark patterns). It was particularly easy to configure glue records for my primary name server.
There are value adds included in the price, such as DNS hosting and maybe email stuff, although some of that is going away along with the price increase.
Increasing their already high price feel very ironic considering that Laurent Chemla, one of the founder of Ghandi wrote a book (Confessions d'un voleur, literally “confessions of a thief”) in which he admits than domain names registrar are selling trivial stuff with a very high premium:
> Je dois livrer un chiffre qui, s’il n’est pas confidentiel, mérite cependant le détour. […] Le coût réel de l’enregistrement d’un nom dans la base de données
mondiale, y compris le coût de fonctionnement d’une telle base, a été évalué en 1999 à... trente cents.
> […] Et parmi ceux que l’ICANN a choisis pour participer à ce jeu, il y a une petite SARL bien française, Gandi, créée pour l’occasion par quatre fous qui ne
comprenaient pas que l’on puisse vendre aussi cher un objet somme toute totalement virtuel. Et moi je suis l’un de ces fous qui, depuis plus d’un an maintenant, vend du vent lui aussi. Ce que NSI vend toujours trente-cinq dollars, Gandi le vend douze euros après l’avoir acheté au prix de gros (six dollars) à NSI. Et ça rapporte énormément, de vendre du vent
summary: in 1999, the per-domain cost for a registrar was around $0.3, NSI sold it to its customers around $35, and had to sell it to $6 to its competitors, and Gandi sold it for twice as much, with almost zero expenses on their side.
What's a good alternative registrar based in the EU?
What an unethical move, they rescind already paid contracts/accounts and the price hike is insane. The went from "no BS" to full of it.
I intend to move all my domains. I also paid for the "premium" email service. But it went from 25€ per year to 86€ ! Domains are also getting a price hike and web hosting too. Time to move
They once gave my data to law enforcement without notifying me, with no obligations not to notify me. It wasn't even an investigation into me, but a shotgun "everyone who talked about this gets asked to testify" case, specifically into a Witcher 3 Google Drive leak.
That's enough for me to avoid this registrar for life.
When registrars requires users to divulge their private information, they become bound to fight tooth and nail to protect it for as long as they retain it.
Screw INWX for betraying their customers. Screw them.
> They once gave my data to law enforcement without notifying me, with no obligations not to notify me.
"Your data", like what? The domains you own and their full whois entries?
> with no obligations not to notify me
While this might be true, they might have seen a risk in notifying you (at least while investigations were ongoing), consider e.g. https://dejure.org/gesetze/StGB/258.html
Also, how did you come to know about all this? Who notified you in the end?
> "Your data", like what? The domains you own and their full whois entries?
Single domain in, WHOIS data out.
> While this might be true, they might have seen a risk in notifying you (at least while investigations were ongoing), consider e.g. https://dejure.org/gesetze/StGB/258.html
I have a copy of the correspondence from Bundesamt fuer Justiz.
> Also, how did you come to know about all this? Who notified you in the end?
The cops questioning me did. I was actually under investigation for a different thing related to this website, so my lawyer got them to confirm it was indeed possibly related. They then dropped that investigation immediately, after months of nothing being added to the file (which I also have). While holding a pretty substantial bit of my hardware hostage. Weird how police work can be expedited when charges are obviously based on police not understanding how the internet (and Paragraph 10 TMG) works and they need to get something done for BfJ. Or maybe they did understand, but didn't want to afford those protections to an individual without commercial interest.
I keep recommending iwantmyname, which is not Europe-based (NZ actually), but founded by some guys from Austria. I've been a customer for ten years now, and I haven't seen a nasty ReactJS redesign, or any other BS. Just a good registrar.
Be wary of their support. Their services are hit or miss (and the misses are REALLY bad) and I experience complete incompetence on their side in both CA and PL.
Gandi are so gross. Had an issue 5 years back now where their site/my connection glitched and they double charged me. It was the most confrontational support exchange I've had (even to this day), and in the end had to go the chargeback route and move my domains off their service.
Never quite understood it as the attitude persisted even as my complaint was (apparently) escalated.
I moved all but one of my domains from Gandi to Porkbun, it's been a joy since. I'm in the UK, and the US pricing is favourable even with the credit card currency fee.
The only domain I have left at Gandi is a .ag (since Porkbun don't do .ag) and an orphaned .eu (because Brexit took that from me). There's nothing I can do with the .eu, so that's gonna languish until 2027.
The .ag domain is going up from 79EUR to 95EUR soon. Time to find a new registrar for that straggler. Even though I can renew at 79EUR now I'm inclined to take the renewal somewhere else.
Edit: could be a coincidence, could be a ccTLD thing, but the auth code that used to be viewable on the Transfer tab at Gandi is no longer there. Strange.
Agrgrgr I'm angry. Gandi got recently bought and people were saying that it was just a matter of time before they would pull something like this. Your predictions were right and I hate that I'm in this position now.
I'm reading the messages of people saying that they had paid for their domains like 10 years in advance but they are going to have to start paying for their mailboxes, which is a breach of contract.
I'd switched registrars to Gandi as a form of protest when the US seized the domains of a UK travel agency that advertised tours of Cub. Because Gandi is based in France, it is not subject to US extraterritorial overreach. I stayed despite their higher prices because of good security like using FIDO U2F keys, so less likely to have an account hijacked, as I self-host my email and that is probably the single biggest point of failure in my threat model.
Can anyone recommend a registrar outside the US that has decent security? Some mentioned OVH and their CTO is a classmate of mine, but the French government is showing worrisome authoritarian trends and I'd prefer a country with strong protections for freedom of speech like Iceland or Norway or that has strong regulation of its spooks like Germany (because of their experience with the Stasi).
Swiss companies have a history of telling the US gov to pound dust. There's a list of Swiss based registrars (that provide .ch domains) maintained by the .ch NIC:
I migrated away from Namecheap because it prevented me from logging in when I used a VPN (that was not Namecheap's own VPN). The company rep's response on HN was less than satisfactory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27705863
To be fair, namecheap support is completely ignorant and incompetent, so it's possible that support rep babbled nonsense and the HN commenter was correct
A 5 year old link with a vague "confirmation" that it's still happening is not exactly damning evidence, either. They could have certainly considered themselves the #1 host until last year. A lot of things changed last year.
They got bought out by a PE firm that's gobbling up registrars, DNS providers and similar. Mostly a moneygrab, so expect prices to increase and product/tech to deteriorate.
I love capitalism in general, but PE firms are mostly a net-negative. They try to squeeze profit out of a company while owning it for 3-5 years, and then selling it at a higher multiple. They usually do this by cutting R&D, jacking up prices and cutting costs (for example moving HQ to some remote area, losing half of staff in the process, but hey, costs are down in Q3…).
Good firms are those that have stable owners and leadership over 20+ years. At that time span, it's obvious that short-sighted cost cutting and customer-hostile behavior is just stupid, which is why fewer such firms does it.
Depends on which perspective. On the firm perspective, it is stupid. On a "grasshopper leader" it is very clever, as they don't plan to be accountable for the long run anyway.
> They got bought out by a PE firm that's gobbling up registrars, DNS providers and similar. Mostly a moneygrab, so expect prices to increase and product/tech to deteriorate.
I haven't noticed much, managing my own domains and some low traffic third parties. I have experience with namecheap, 101domains, gandi, godaddy, and others I can't remember from the top of my head. The most tangible for me is the web interface they give you - I like gandi's the most, and there are some shitty providers that don't even have one. Otherwise they are similar, they reserve the domain for you, let you set it up and provide nameservers so that you don't have to host those. Another difference is how much their website, and their renewal flow makes you hate life with all the dark patterns they employ. Godaddy and 101 were quite horrible in this regard, I really needed to double-check before paying that they haven't slipped in a value-add that I don't need, but would cost me nevertheless. Again, gandi is one of the better ones in this regard too.
Gandi also has a nice API to manage the domains. I use that with a simple shell script to have my own dynamic DNS.
So if your usage is as limited as mine, no major differences really.
Some have different DNS capabilities. For example, I switched from Epic to Hover and couldn’t properly set up a heroku app (can’t remember the details, but they were unable to support a basic heroku app setup). So then I switched to namecheap and it’s been fine (though I feel like a lot of my emails go to spam on hotmail/yahoo/aol accounts - which is perhaps another difference between providers: getting their email ips blacklisted).
Some registrars makes it difficult to leave, like having to actually to speak to a human on the phone to get a domain transfer authorized. That was my main gripe with my previous registrar.
In steady state, most registrars seem equivalent, and the main difference is how they handle billing.
I've been through registrar hell. I registered a ccTLD and wanted to transfer since the price was way lower elsewhere. Their CMS was complete garbage and the auto-generated transfer token/code was evidently bogus, as every registrar I attempted to transfer to said it wasn't right. Of course, the support from the registrar I was attempting to leave was nonexistent, always blaming the other guys. Yeah right, screw you TLD Registrar Solutions - avoid any of their brands at all costs. There's almost nothing you can do. My solution was to wait for domain expiry and re-register. Would recommend bigger names.
There are probably many valid answers to this, but my concern would be about bugs or other security failings allowing an attacker to alter one's registration details (e.g. nameservers). This could be catastrophic, since everyone seems to base their security on email (e.g. password resets) these days, in true "pass the hard problem of identity and authentication on to someone else" fashion.
In other words, whoever controls the registration controls the nameservers, and whoever controls the nameservers controls the MX records, and whoever controls the MX records can reset passwords. (Ideally, we'd all be using MFA for every possible thing, but in practice that may not be possible for the hundreds of services one might be using.)
Quoting myself from the previous thread... my requirements are no 1. glaring technical issues, 2. u2f support.
> Based on advice here I just tried Porkbun. A not-quite-professional website that prefers making jokes to fixing layout bugs, I try to sign up and the symbols in my password cause it to fail with a 403 (!!). I'm super scared about their technical abilities and general security. Are we going to see another Gandi 6 mo down the line?
> Domains are the keys to the internet atm, it would be nice to see someone take it seriously.
>
> Edit: I guess I'll try realtimeregister, since I haven't seen anything negative and they support U2F per Yubikey's catalog.
>
> Edit2: Cool, cool, when you sign up they assign you a non-random password which anyone can use to log in and view your personal information.
>
> Edit3: Others with u2f support that aren't MAMAA: Cloudflare (close), OVH, DNSimple (accounts are $60/year)
Cloudflare doesn't allow you to point the nameservers elsewhere which made migration painful. I went with DNSimple.
My last two purchases have been on PorkBun to avoid Gandi. However they don't offer `.la` domains, which i have one of. Still need to find somewhere to move my .la
I'm boring and I just moved my crap from Gandi to Route 53 ages ago.
It's not the cheapest, but the pricing is stable and predictable, the tools are good and I can automate swapping subdomains if an IP changes trivially.
Just be aware that you can receive massive bills if you use Route 53 as DNS because you pay per query and there is no way to block bad requests. I have seen >1000$/month on a single domain.
Just had a look at R53 and the price calculation page alone is enough to scare most people of :) Also their .io pricing is $70 vs $40 with most other registrars.
Do I understand correctly that they have a recurrent charge for domain DNS records?
Whenever I needed to change IPv6 glue records I had to contact support. And even after that, the webUI did not reflect the current configuration, so I couldn't even change IPv4 glue records after that. Other than that I was ok with namecheap.
Gandi registrar client here: never heard of this. never got any email about this.
Using gandi because it handles my-country-specific payment systems (aka no credit card to provide online, and no need of a big tech web engine, like steam wallet codes).
I got an email from Gandi earlier today and it was talking about their commitment to providing best tools and blah blah blah. I didn’t bother to read the thing.
But after seeing this headline on HN, I realised that actually that email was probably about a pricing update. Went back to my inbox and sure enough, the subject of the email says pricing update.
Anyway, it seems to be mainly about DNS and email services, etc, none of which I use.
I only use Gandi as registrar for domain names. And then for the DNS I use Cloudflare. For email I use iCloud.
The sad thing is that I've been very happy with Gandi for a long time.
If I were to leave them, I don't even know who I would turn to instead.
GoDaddy? Hell naw.
Google Domains? No thanks.
Cloudflare Registrar? Rather not put all my eggs in one basket. Plus, I don't necessarily trust Cloudflare to be registrar for my domains altough I am happy to use their DNS service and their Cloudflare Pages service.
same here, i feel i am at a loss for options. gandi was always very community friendly, and the ability to allow anyone to pay to renew a domain is a very useful feature especially for communities. we even had gandi people show up at our linux user group meetings when they were in town for other business, and they didn't come to sell stuff, but to hang out and have a good time.
I've been using PurelyMail[1] (it's been on hacker news a couple of times already) for about a year now and haven't had any issues with it. It uses consumption-based pricing so for my use (with two domains set up) it comes out to about $0.5/month. I think it's a small team (maybe just one person?) that maintains it.
this is the kind of pricing i have been looking for. i have a few accounts that are extremely low use because they serve as a backup to other channels, so with the advanced payment model i'd actually even save money over gandi's old pricing.
I've been pretty happy with mailbox.org, German based and has support for various keys to use with custom domains (SPF/DKIM) including the ability to have the same custom domain used across multiple accounts (nice for extended family domains and the like, safe as you still need to make the DNS changes on that provider).
Pricing is reasonable and the limited support interaction I've had has been good.
I believe the real scandal is the increase in domain prices for the most loyal customers. Today, .it domains cost me 10 Euros plus VAT, from July they will cost 19.99 Euros plus VAT. That's a 99.9% increase and a lower level of service.
> AWS provides the Domain Name Registration Services through ICANN-accredited registrars. AWS currently provides Domain Name Registration Services through Gandi SAS , Mesh Digital Limited, Amazon Registrar, Inc., and other ICANN-accredited registrars (the “Registrar”), and your use of the Domain Name Registration Services is subject to their terms.
Hi, Tutanota team here. In case you're looking for a new mailbox, Tutanota might be an option. We've also had a pricing update recently, but legacy users are allowed to keep what they have in full. Plus, we have a 50% offer running at the moment: https://tutanota.com/blog/announcement-new-prices
I have Used your service and Liked it but To this day i cannot wrap my head around the fact that i cannot bulk export my emails. The vendor lock in is huge and the feature has been in progress for very long time and i decided it was not worth the wait and left the service since tutanota does not allow IMAP. What a shame.
Great to see you guys here.
I have been considering moving my mailbox to Tutanota but last time I checked it was not possible to import emails. What's the progress on that?
However, there's a lot work left to be done as we do not want to simply dump all the emails in one folder, but match the folders that you had used previously. Because of this, the release is a few more months into the future. Thanks for your patience!
I have a domain registered on Gandi.net and email @mydomain.com also on Gandi.net
I am loath to abandon it as I use it for numerous accounts and contacts.
Will tutanota support webmail and app for that domain?
“No bullshit” is no more. https://www.gandi.net/en/no-bullshit
That promise is what justified their slightly higher prices. With it broken, I have no reason not to transfer to a less expensive registrar. So that I’ve now done, and Gandi can try to win me back next year.