I'm thinking about switching to a different mail and cloud-storage provider. Not for financial reasons, because what I have is pretty cheap already.

Right now I'm using:

• Email: Posteo.de for 1€/month
• Cloud: GreenWebspace for 4€/month
• VPN: Mullvad.net for 5€/month

While I'd like to use a VPN, it's not the most important service to me. What I'm mostly thinking about is a privacy-aware email service where I can have a lot of aliases to avoid giving my mail address out to every service I sign up. For file-storage, I want something reliable and accessible above everything else. I was running my own nextcloud instance for a while but stopped because I did not want to store sensitive date on my amateur vps.

So I have been looking at some alternatives:

• In an ideal world, I'd love to use hey.com because their approach to email seems really forward thinking. The idea that unsolicited emails are blocked by default seems like a crazy good thing to me. Because they are US-based and also not cheap, I decided against it.
• Another option is Fastmail which are also US-based and therefore a no-no.
• Protonmail is based in switzerland, they are relatively cheap (I'm estimating about 4€ per month which includes email, cloud storage and a basic vpn package). They have the limitation of not being able to use a email client on mobile (they have a dedicated app) and on desktop only using their bridge application. I'm not looking to switch out fairemail any time soon so i might decide against them, even if it ticks most boxes otherwise.
• Purelymail might be a perfect fit if all you want is cheap, secure email. Since I want my calendars and contacts to live where my email is, I will not switch to it, even though I find it very fascinating.

After looking into these services, I found out that my domain registrar, united-domains, offers a free email account with unlimited aliases, which was exactly what I was looking for. So I decided to stay with Posteo and GreenWebspace. I've payed for both them for a year in advance, so I don't want that to go to waste. I'll experiment with using the aliases on my own domain for now.