Question 1

What is a Fastmail alternative?

Accepted Answer

Any other route to hosting and running your company mail. That covers rival platforms such as Google Workspace, Zoho Mail, Proton Mail and Microsoft 365, and it covers managed services like this one, where somebody else carries the licence and holds the account instead of handing you a panel and a knowledge base.

Question 2

How is Cascadia different from Fastmail?

Accepted Answer

Fastmail sells a platform you then administer yourself, with very good support for whoever does the administering. We sell the administering. The subscription is ours to carry, the migration ours to run, the authentication ours to keep aligned, and your staff phone us rather than a colleague. We deliver that on Google Workspace and Zoho Mail. We do not manage Fastmail today, so if you are staying there this page is a comparison rather than a proposal.

Question 3

How does your price compare to theirs?

Accepted Answer

Fastmail publishes its plan prices on its own site, behind a currency and term selector that does not appear in the page as delivered, so we are not going to restate a figure we could not verify. Our management fee is five dollars per user per month on Zoho Mail and ten on Google Workspace, with the platform licence carried on our account and billed alongside it. So we cost more than the subscription alone, and the difference is a person who owns the panel. If somebody on your team already does that work well, our price makes no sense and you should back your own arithmetic.

Question 4

Is Fastmail cheaper than this?

Accepted Answer

Bought as a bare subscription, almost certainly, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The same is true of Google Workspace and Zoho Mail. Any platform costs less than that platform plus a person to run it. Our price should be measured against the hours somebody in your business currently loses to mail administration, or against the salary you would pay to make it their actual job.

Question 5

What is not included in a Fastmail Basic plan?

Accepted Answer

The administration, chiefly. Beyond that, Fastmail's own compare table lists Basic as not supporting custom domains, third party apps such as Outlook and iPhone Mail, Scheduled Send, Snooze, or the retention archive, at 6 GB per user. Standard adds the domain and the desktop clients at 60 GB, and Professional adds the archive at 150 GB. Fastmail publishes all of it clearly. It is simply not what somebody comparing the cheapest seat price usually reads.

Question 6

How does your billing differ from theirs?

Accepted Answer

We bill monthly for the seats you actually have, licence and management together on one invoice, with no term and no renewal date for anybody here to forget. When somebody leaves, you tell us and the next invoice is smaller. Fastmail will credit you pro rata when you remove a user, which is fair of them, but somebody at your company still has to notice the leaver and go and do it. In most of the accounts we inherit, nobody has.

Question 7

Should we move off Fastmail at all?

Accepted Answer

Often not, and we would rather say so early than at the third meeting. If somebody at your company runs it well and enjoys doing it, stay where you are. The move makes sense when nobody has held the account for a year, when people are sitting on a tier that cannot use your own domain, or when the seat count has drifted well past your payroll and nobody can say who is on what.

Question 8

Can you move us off Fastmail without losing anything?

Accepted Answer

Yes, with one exception worth raising early. Mail, contacts and calendars all come across and nobody's address changes, because addresses belong to your domain rather than to Fastmail. The exception is anybody whose address was never on your domain, which on Basic it could not have been. Those people move onto a proper company address and their mail comes with them, but the old address stops working when the Fastmail account does, so tell whoever writes to them.

Question 9

Will anybody lose mail during the move?

Accepted Answer

No. We copy first and cut the DNS over second, so mail keeps flowing throughout and nothing is deleted from the old account until you say so. A message can still land in the old mailbox during the short window after the copy finishes, so we run a final sweep the following week rather than calling it done at the switch.

Question 10

What if nobody here knows the administrator password?

Accepted Answer

That is a common starting point and it is usually recoverable here. Fastmail staffs support around the clock and will work through account ownership with whoever can actually demonstrate it, which is more than several larger providers manage. The domain is yours regardless, so mail can be rebuilt on it even in the worst case. Tell us at the start rather than on the migration weekend.

Question 11

Does this replace Fastmail or sit alongside it?

Accepted Answer

For mail it replaces it. Companies sometimes ask whether we can run the staff mailboxes and leave a founder on their own Fastmail account, and the answer today is no, because managing Fastmail sits outside this service. If you want a split, the sensible one is a personal Fastmail account for whoever loves it and your company mail somewhere it can be owned properly, and we will map that out rather than sell around it.

Question 12

Can we keep our existing email addresses?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and you should. Addresses belong to your domain, not to your provider, so moving where the mail lives changes nothing on anybody's business card. The one exception is a company still sending from an address that ends in a web host's own domain. That is worth fixing on the way through rather than carrying forward for another five years.

Question 13

Who owns the mailboxes and the data?

Accepted Answer

You do. The domain is yours, the mailboxes are yours, and everything inside them is yours. Ask for a full export whenever you like and it comes back the same week, in a standard format, at no charge. If you leave, we hand over the admin credentials rather than making you rebuild from nothing. Worth saying plainly: Google and Zoho are large companies with other businesses attached, and Fastmail sells nothing but mail. If that difference matters to you, it is a fair reason to stay exactly where you are.

Question 14

Who sets up SPF, DKIM and DMARC?

Accepted Answer

We do, on every domain your company sends from, and we align them so the whole chain can be verified. Then we read the DMARC reports, which is the step nearly everyone skips and the one that tells you what is actually sending as you. Once the reports come back clean we move the policy from monitoring to enforcement, and we keep reading them after that.

Question 15

How long does a migration take, and what breaks?

Accepted Answer

Most moves finish inside three weeks of the first conversation, and under fifty mailboxes usually cuts over across a single weekend. Coming off Fastmail, add a day for anybody who was never on your own domain. What breaks, reliably, is whatever nobody mentioned: the scanner that emails PDFs, the website form, the billing system with a password from 2019. We ask for that list up front and we still find two more.

Question 16

What if I want to leave?

Accepted Answer

Thirty days notice ends it and everything is portable. The DNS records sat on your own domain throughout because they were always yours. Mailboxes, contacts and calendars stay exactly where they are, and we hand you the admin credentials rather than making anybody rebuild. If the right answer for you turns out to be Fastmail after all, we will say that too.

A Fastmail Alternative For Companies That Need An Administrator, Not A Better Inbox

Nothing is broken and nobody here can add a user

The cheapest plan cannot carry your company domain

Fastmail support is genuinely good. It answers whoever holds the account

Cascadia

Without Cascadia

Somebody holds the admin panel, and it is not anybody on your payroll

SPF, DKIM and DMARC rechecked whenever your DNS changes

New staff have working mail on their first morning

Seats retired the day somebody leaves, and confirmed back to you

Every seat can connect Outlook and iPhone Mail, not only the dearer ones

Licence and labour on one invoice from one company

Mailbox migration included rather than quoted as a project

DMARC reports actually read, not merely switched on

Your staff contact us directly with no ticket allowance

Nobody on your side needs the admin password or a spare hour

Where Fastmail fits

Where Cascadia is the better buy

Where Fastmail is strong

Where we are the stronger buy

How your mailboxes move onto a managed account, in four steps

We audit what you have before changing anything

We build the mailboxes and align the authentication

Mail, contacts and calendars are copied across

The DNS cuts over and your staff have our number

Don't Take Our Word For It

The person who set it up left, and nobody replaced the password

Half the company is on the tier that cannot use the company domain

Dollars per user each month to manage

Setup fee, and no user minimum

Weeks from first conversation to cutover

Fastmail alternative and managed business email FAQs

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