Our pricing explained

Why the Price?

Providing an encrypted email service costs money. Some companies, like Gmail and Yahoo, offer free email because they profit from collecting and selling your personal information.

We charge a subscription fee because we do not sell our users data and because it costs money to maintain the code and servers.  We have the most secure email service based on an analysis of security features. The price of our service reflects what we deliver to our users.

We Are Self Funded

If a government or company had financial control over CTemplar we would be forced to remove anonymous signups.  We would also have to comply with their explicit demands. Governments and global corporations want something in return for their investment and your personal data is more valuable than money to them.  We are the only self-funded encrypted email service that pledges never to accept corporate or government funding.

Some people want an email service backed by a Government or global corporation because they want the feeling of safety it can provide. A Government-backed email is usually cheaper because the Government invests money to cheapen the subscription cost with the goal of increasing total users.  If you want cheaper prices and the security of a government backed email service then CTemplar is not for you.   You could try Tutanota which is funded by the European Union, or Protonmail which is funded by Swiss Gov backed FONGIT, the European Union, and a billion-dollar global corporation called CRV.   It is best if you review your needs and then pick the email service that’s best for you.  It might not be CTemplar and that’s ok.  What’s important is your privacy is protected.

Our service is more costly because we exclusively depend on our users’ donations.  

We Do Not Re-Use Existing Open-Source Webmail Code

Some email services use open-source code from Rainloop or Mailpile. There is nothing wrong with that, but we wanted to make sure our service was designed by us, from scratch. These email services use other people code to launch their service quickly.

We are more expensive than email services using code from free sources because we custom created our email service because it allows better security and improved user experience.  We can not compete against companies that re-brand open source code as their own.  

We Do Not Use VPS clusters

Your data is saved on Icelandic servers, which offers the best location in the world for your data. Read more about the protection Iceland offers. Because we use physical servers in Iceland, we are not able to reduce our price using cheap cloud storage. We feel this is necessary, so our users can be sure what laws apply to their data.

If you like our work and would like to help keep our lights on, please consider paying for a membership. If you can’t afford our membership, we are still happy and honored to have you here.

And, as always, if something is not working or you would like to make a suggestion, please send us a message to “[email protected]” and give us a chance to improve.

The CTemplar Team