That's because providing a service like this really sucks the life out of you. The theory was that we could either drive people towards the paying accounts, or monetize the accounts some other way.
The stats said - free accounts very rarely converted to paying accounts. All the monitizing options for people with free accounts are pretty creepy, even text-only ads were bad. We hated that.
So we turned off free accounts. FastMail only provides paid accounts, and in exchange we don't need to look for another business model - we take payment in exchange for providing an awesome service and everybody is happy.
... and per the estimated price of $0.30/yr for 2Gb storage - our costs are much higher than that. On the other hand we have 3 full copies of every email store, two in one datacentre and one in another - and each of them is on RAID1 SSD and RAID6 SATA, all encrypted - with enough CPU and RAM to work fast. Metadata and the current week's email is on SSD, the rest on SATA. There's a reason we're fast, and it's because people pay us enough to be able to invest in full time engineers working on optimising our usage of the hardware resources we have. Feel free to read the source code for our IMAP server at:
(or have a look at the git repository at git.cyrusimap.org where we are pushing many of our contributions back into the master branch in preparation for the public 2.5 release soon)
I feel no guilt at not offering free service. We provide value for money to our customers.
