Family accounts?
 

What happened?

I would like to be able to purchase a mini account for a child but certainly would not pay full price.....

Thanks

Family plans went away when FastMail introduced the current plans. You can't sign up for a new one. If you had a family account, you were grandfathered in, and you should be able to add more users to it.

This is wrong! See below.

You cannot add another user to a "grandfathered" account, or make any change.
Until several years ago, a group account (family or business account) could have several users, each with the service level according to the user's needs.
Then it was changed so that all users must subscribe to the same service level, so now all users must use the service level that is needed by the user with the highest needs.
Existing accounts could keep their existing structure, but no change is possible without changing to the new scheme. If a single user needs a bit more space the all users have to get the same service level as the most heavy user.

I have a "grandfathered" family plan. One "enhanced" user (myself) and 3 "full" users. If I want to add storage to one of the "full" users I would need to change everyone to "standard" and it would cost about twice what I pay today. None of them needs "standard". "basic' is enough for them, but I need "standard" if I cannot keep "enhanced" because i use my own domain. So for the time being I just share a folder with my son so he can keep big emails there without going over his quota.
It's possible to go back 15 years and so what we did before there were family plans: get individual accounts and use forwarding rules to allow everyone to use addresses in the family's domain.

That doesn't match my experience. I've been able to add users and change levels on existing accounts since FastMail stopped offering the old family/business plans. What you're describing sounds like the way the current multi-user plans work.

I don't know why I thought for the past two years that I'm stuck with either the current users levels unless I change to the new scheme. I guess I'm going to upgrade some of my users now...
Still I think it's a shame that a family of four (that doesn't have a legacy account) cannot use FastMail with their own domain for less than 200$ / year.

Yes. You’re right. One of the reasons I cannot use Fastmail.

Too expensive for my whole family.

It actually looks like Fastmail has just quietly addressed this.... I'm not sure when the change went live, but I suspect it's only been in the past few days —*it definitely wasn't there last month when I was tweaking settings for my daughter's account — but it's now possible to have each user in a group plan on a different tier.

Adding a new user will show a new screen with the three plans, allowing you to pick the one you want, and you can even switch plans for an existing user — a new section now appears on the edit screen allowing you to upgrade or downgrade the plan they're already on.

This is also confirmed on Fastmail's Pricing Page:

It also looks like users on the "Basic" plan can also now use custom domains as long as they're part of an account being managed by a Standard or Professional tier user...