Enhanced v Standard Accounts?
 

So my "Enhanced" account has just come up for renewal? And the renewal screen is offering me the option to "upgrade" to a "Standard" account. Does this really offer me anything extra over my "Enhanced" account?

I thought it was the same thing.

Possibly just a little more storage.

If you upgrade your account to 'Standard' you can't go back to enhanced - at the price the enhanced account is a good deal....

Most of the options under Settings... Admin... Policy are unavailable to those of us with Enhanced.

Apart from that, and different storage quotas, I believe they're quite similar.

Many thanks for all the advice. Looks like it makes sense to stick with Enhanced.

David has come closest, but not quite said out loud what should be pointed out: Enhanced is one of the old, now no longer offered, plans, and you can keep using it under a "grandfather" type arrangement. It should be $40/yr, right? Standard is one of the new plan choices, with apparently similar features, for $10/yr more. So I concur that staying with Enhanced is a no-brainer :)

Comparison between Enhanced and Standard accounts
 

Looking at Help, here are the differences. It appears that all other features (such as sending and receiving limits) are identical between the new Standard and legacy Enhanced accounts:
So upgrading from Enhanced to Standard results in:

• A cost increase factor of X1.25 ($50/$40).
• A mail storage increase factor of X1.66 (25GB/15GB)
• A file storage increase factor of X2 (10GB/5GB)

So the Standard account has a lower price per GB of storage if you need the additional space (75% for mail storage and 63% for file storage). I'm currently using 47% of my Enhanced mail storage quota and 9% of my file storage quota, so I have no reason to upgrade at this time.

Bill

There's also some other differences n5bb. The enhanced accounts can't use the things available in settings-policy.

Also, I bet new features will not be available for old accounts..

Such as? I'm still on "Enhanced" so I'm guessing that I'm not seeing any of these new settings... I've got Company, Custom Login, and Disclaimer on mine, although it's worth noting that my account is actually an Enhanced under a "Family" plan, so that might be a different story too...

I can see the settings too (on Enhanced). Can you use them? I get a message saying I need to upgrade.

Legacy Enhanced accounts also get multi-year renewal discounts (i.e. 3 years for $100), which I don't think Standard accounts receive. That drives the price down to $33.33/year.

Yes, I can use them, but again, my Enhanced account is part of the old "Family" plan so I'm guess that's probably why.

Are the multi-year renewal discounts still available on the legacy plans? I'm still months out from having to renew, but right now if I want to renew early, the only option I see is for one year.

IIRC, Family plans don't have the multi-year option.

Well, that would explain it then :) Thanks.

(Sorry to resurrect an older thread, but it fits so well that I decided it would be a waste to start a new one.)

I have an Enhanced Plan - it's a five year plan since that's the duration I selected when I first signed up. Looking at the renewal screen it is offering me to renew the Enhanced (Legacy) Plan for another 5 years at a cost of $160, which works out to $32 per year. Can't beat that with a stick!

My only gripe right now is that they seem to have trashed the old "Service Plans" page which was actually a big grid showing the available plans across the top and all the features/limits/sizes etc. down the left side of the grid. I am kinda lost without that grid! Trying to match up all the information shown on the grid with current features and limits doesn’t seem to be possible.

The items on the left side of the grid in an older version are shown at the bottom of this post. (Can't seem to get back to regular text beyond the table now!)

So how to gather all that same information for all the current plans now?

Thanks!

Jim

Account pricing and service
Cost
Minimum contract
Automatic renewal available
Technical Support
Minimum characters in username
Commercial use allowed
Backup email address required
Email
Email access methods
Web-based email
IMAP (email)
POP3 (email)
WAP (email)
SMTP (sending email)
Email features
Virus scanning
Spam protection
Mail Forwarding
Own subdomain
External POP/Hotmail Retrieval
Aliases/Own domain email
Aliases
Use your own domains
Email storage and transfer limits
Mail storage quota
Extra mail storage
Maximum attachment size
Hourly/daily message quota
Hourly/daily transfer quota
File storage
File storage access methods
Web-based file storage
DAV (files)
FTP (files)
Basic web publishing
File storage and transfer limits
File storage quota
Extra file storage
Hourly/daily file transfer quota
Other service limits
Address book
Personalities
Pop links
(collect mail from external accounts)
Pop links auto-collect time interval
Advanced rules
Custom sieve script
Notepad entries
Poll window
(Alerts you to new mail)
Hourly Logins

I described about 10 posts ago the differences I discovered comparing the legacy Enhanced with the current Standard plans.

I upgraded my Enhanced account to Standard earlier this year. I also have a Basic account. Let me know if I can answer any questions you can't discover with my earlier post or these help pages:
https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/
https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/limits.html

You can of course file a normal Fastmail support request with any specific questions.

Bill

Hi Bill.

You only addressed mail storage and file storage. I'm thinking about aliases, number of email addresses and what type of addresses. (There used to be strict character limits - we discussed that in an earlier thread). Attachment sizes, sending limits, etc. It's all probably located somewhere - maybe! - but it sure would be easier in a single table. Why abandon such a clear aid?

BTW, your earlier post (the one you reference as "about 10 posts ago") states that you were so far under the storage limits with your Enhanced Plan that you "...have no reason to upgrade at this time." Yet now you say that you upgraded from Enhanced to Standard earlier this year. What changed in such a short time?

Thanks!

Jim

That's good if you live in the US, but for Australian customers that relates to about $210 so on my 2 accounts that is $100 for me It seems so stupid....an Australian company that does not take Australian currency.

Aliases:

• Fastmail domains: 2 or more characters in length. The alias must start with a letter, must not end in a period character, and can contain a-z, 0-9, period, or underscore.
• Personal domains: 1 or more characters in length. The alias must not start or end with a period. The other characters can be a-z, 0-9, period, or underscore.
• The limit for the number of aliases is shown in the account/limits link I gave. It is 600, plus 15 for every user in the account.

Identities (sending From addresses):

• 500

Fetch accounts (POP3 fetch):

• 50

The limits on attachment size and numbers of messages sent are also described on this help page. The limit on attachment size is 70 MB after encoding:
https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/limits.html

Bill

I went from Enhanced account type to a lite back ooh a year or more before they started the new pricing system...

Back December 2016 when my renewal was due up I renewed my Lite account for a further 5 years for only $50 US...
good enough for me for now...

maybe I will upgraded to basic after 5 years are up...
I don't really need the higher MAIL/FILE storage quotas...
only feature I would prefer is...
ftp access which I don't get on lite account...


EDIT:
one thing I don't see either on the new plans or old legacy plans is WHICH ones support FTP access... :/
I only know that my current lite plan does NOT support FTP access... :(

I would also be curious to know why Bill upgraded after mentioning he would stay with the Enhanced.

I'm on the Enhanced plan as well, but maybe we're missing some rationale?

The help is clear on this issue. All current account types and the legacy Full, Enhanced and Premier accounts support FTP access.
https://www.fastmail.com/help/files/davnftp.html
You must use an application password for FTP access, as well as any other non-Fastmail client accessing your account.

Bill

I recently decided to reorganize my email accounts, closing some and upgrading others.

yeah... I'm Lite... so am outa luck it would seem... :(
btw I did setup my App PW for FTP access so that's all set if and when I eventually upgrade my email FM account... O_o ;)

Which do what exactly?

Customizing the login screen (themes, logo), or adding a disclaimer to the bottom of all emails sent by all users.

Nothing that matters to me, but some companies seem to like adding those disclaimers.

I have a family+Lite account? Can that be upgraded to Enhanced, then rolled up (along with my domains) into a non-family Enhanced account for the multi-year discount which family accounts don't get? Are you stuck buying the first year of Enhanced at full price or can you go straight into a multi-year deal?

as far as I know they no longer sell their Legacy accounts so u will have to upgrade to one of their new accounts types, Basic, Standard, or Professional...

Yes, but some people have reported still being able to create Legacy subaccounts in their family plans, which suggests what I proposed may be possible.

pricing - plan change related ?
 

I've had a paid FastMail account since 2003 but also have dabbled with Gmail, iCloud, and my own server. I am on the "Enhanced" plan which is about to expire and was surprised to see that they were willing to offer me a renewal of the "Enhanced" plan for $35 more than what the same resources would cost under the "Standard" plan. This is primarily due to extra storage charges for the enhanced plan which are included in the standard.

I hadn't been paying attention to their plan change because I have this vague recollection that FastMail's prior business practice was to automatically move you to a new plan if it strictly dominated your current plan at a lower cost. I've looked through my account history and it looks like that happened in 2012. Although, when I contacted customer support they said that yes they would have moved me to the lower cost plan and refunded the difference if I had requested it.

Am I imagining that in the past they would have moved you to the new lower cost plan automatically, if it strictly dominated the plan you were on? Just curious.

Yeah, I definitely appear to be able to change account levels and create new Legacy level sub accounts in my Family plan, although I should note that I haven't actually tried to do it as I have no need for another account right now — for all I know it may fail after clicking the "Purchase" or "Save" buttons, but my gut feeling is that if it wasn't possible, the "New User" button wouldn't still be there in the first place.

That said, I don't think changing an account level is likely to be an issue. However, since Family plans aren't eligible for multi-year renewals, the question would be whether you can shed the "family" part of the plan.

However, I don't see any way of doing this in the current account settings, so I'd imagine you'd have to contact support directly and see if they can do that for you. As it stands, my whole "Family" account gets automatically renewed in April (in my case), and the only options I have under "Billing & Plan" are to renew it now or switch to one of the new plans. Other options for changing plan levels and adding new users are on the "Users" screen.

I don't recall a case where FastMail offered a new individual account that was cheaper than existing ones but had greater resources, until this last year with the discontinuation of the legacy plans. What is the 2012 instance that you seem to be remembering?