The value lies in making the project sustainable. Thunderbird mail client relies on donations to pay the bills, monthly payments will allow them to make income projections more accurate.
They have reduced the Early Bird price to $6/month, found on their page. That includes 60GB of file storage and 30GB for mail.
Mailbox.org is “fine,” in that in the years I’ve been using it I haven’t had any major crises or issues. But there are a litany of annoyances and ways it falls short, and the pace of development is glacial to nonexistent. For instance:
Altogether it’s not been a nightmare but it has left me wanting something better.
For me, the value is not there. Between the pricing structure and what you get in return, I would pass on it pretty easily. But I also think you may be taking the wrong angle if you think a new email service is pointless. Competition is fantastic, no matter what shape it comes in.
I would love to see Mozilla double down and create an ecosystem that can compete with Proton and bring in more normies. Maybe they could finally build services people care about and get away from Google’s grip.
I think it will be like duckduckgo vpn. Informed people will wonder why they would pay so much for a VPN given the other choices, uninformed people will rightly think trusting duckduckgo is smarter than going with their uninformed opinion, and a subset will just want to support the company they like.
DuckDuckGo plus/pro essentially gives you multi-model AI access for half the price of a single premium AI subscription, then throws in the VPN and identity services on top.
That sounds great! Any more info on when it’ll launch?
I have had access to the closed beta for the last couple of weeks, however I was signed up to the wait list immediately after it went live.
Some initial info that could be subject to change as they are still developing the product, this is all publicly available information.
If you’re curious about what they are working on there is a public roadmap:
Do you get to use it for free during the beta? Any way for me to get in?
Can’t speak for others but I definitely don’t get it for free during the beta lol
LOL! I wouldn’t mind paying just to get in. Any other way to get in?
I can only speak for the pricing in Australia, it was $100 AUD (~$72 USD) a year. You can’t test it for free unfortunately.
Thanks for clearing that up. 
Thanks for sharing your perspective. I do believe making the project sustainable is likely to benefit existing Thunderbid users (although one could argue that this benefit might be neutralized by the corresponding focus shift / expansion), but in order to make this a succes, I fear the offer towards potential paying customers should be a lot more substantial. As I mentioned before, I like Thunderbird a lot for managing both my private and work mail, but I don’t feel the urge to switch email addresses (last time I did, it took me about two years to fully migrate).
Even with their most lenient settings, they constantly block legitimate emails. I think I read somewhere that their philosophy is basically, “This is our infrastructure, and poorly configured email servers don’t have an inherent right to use it.” Some of their green initiatives might be behind it.
After some deliberation, I decided to sign up after receiving my beta invite. For $70, the service is lacking, though basic imap and the 15 aliases are fully functional. However, I think it’s important to support this project in its early stages so it can improve. Like many, I’ve been benefitting from Mozilla for decades. Without a doubt earned the $70.
Encryption may be planned, but it seems like a weak priority that devs are lukewarm on:
Additional Encryption at Rest with OpenPGP or S/MIME:
"This is an exciting feature for power users, though we need to be intentional on how we present this option to the user. Once enabled, searching email in Thunderbird will be more complicated as the messages are encrypted. If the user loses the keys, they will no longer have access to their email. Webmail will not work with this feature enabled.
Further, there can be a false sense of security, as in theory we could put a proxy in front of the mail server and “read” the email before it is encrypted (not that we would).
That said, giving the user the ability to upload their keys and optionally enable this feature may be a compelling part of Thundermail’s story, and enable a few additional quick wins such as WKD.
This exploration will be part of the 2026 Roadmap as a P3 item."
-Philipp Preißer-Kewisch
Instead the focus is going to the web client, which many people were upset about not having. There is a basic web client available now.
For anyone who wants PGP, I suggest joining the beta waitlist, subscribing, and requesting this feature at the link provided. Right now they (likely correctly) seem to think it’s not a priority for its users, nor do they see it as a basic feature that will be used outside “power users”.
We should show them the privacy space will support their service post-beta if they choose to make privacy a greater long term priority. If you like me have never donated to Mozilla, consider this a form of doing so.
As for how I’m using this, I have not yet switched over.
For now, I use thunderbird message filters move any incoming, untagged thundermail messages to my personal stalwart server, tag the messages, and then move the thundermail messages back to my thundermail inbox every 10 minutes. Since my self hosted server has my pgp key uploaded, this means unencrypted messages will be replaced with encrypted messages relatively quickly as long as my desktop is running.
This is obviously not a good solution for the average person, compared to mailbox.org or proton that would encrypt them immediately. For now I am treating it as a one time donation. Whether I use it long term will depend on how their service develops.
I was really hoping that this would turn out to be something great. And I’ve been following it closely, but man, what you get even for that $72 a year in 2026 seems abysmally bad. 
I really hope they flesh out their structures before launching, otherwise I don’t know how this is going to be competitive.
The 30GB of email storage and 15 aliases across two domains is at least in the same ballpark as other providers for that price range, while there is likely to be some lower cost or free tier post beta. Having set up a stalwart server, I believe they are proceeding at a good pace for a beta release. There are a lot of moving parts where their credibility will be destroyed if they mess it up, so they must proceed with caution when adding features.
The main user base is nonetheless likely to be thunderbird users who want to support the project. They have a lot of ground to cover to catch up to established providers enough to be considered competitive.
I did the same. I subscribed for one year just to support launch the project.
But to be honest, I don´t think I will renew it. It is expensive for what it offers.
We will have to see what the future pricing tiers look like. I wouldn’t be surprised if they eventually add a free tier, but they are explicitly planning for there to be more tiers in the future.
I don’t see myself resubscribing at the current rate either. I’m considering switching to posteo instead. I don’t think anyone would buy a posteo account just to spoof me and they have more encryption at rest. I’m on the fence about what the right choice will be. One can’t complain about posteo’s $12 / 4GB storage rate though.