addy.io is the closest thing to us in philosophy and the cheapest capable option here — open source, self-hostable, €3/month for Pro. It also has browser extensions, mobile apps, GPG encryption and reply-from-alias, none of which we have. The one place we differ meaningfully on behaviour: addy.io silently discards mail to a deactivated alias, and we hard-bounce it.
Comparison
| addy.io Free | addy.io Pro | Don't SPAM Me | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | €0 | €3/mo billed yearly (€4 monthly) | $0 + your domain |
| Standard aliases | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Shared-domain aliases | 10 active | Unlimited | n/a — own domain only |
| Custom domains | ✗ | 20 | ✓ Required |
| Recipients | 1 | 30 | Multiple forwarding addresses |
| Bandwidth | 10MB/month | Unlimited | No published limit |
| Reply / send from alias | ✗ | ✓ 200/day | ✗ Not yet |
| Aliases created on first mail | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Browser extension | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Mobile apps | ✓ iOS + Android | ✓ | iOS |
| GPG/OpenPGP encryption | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Open source / self-hostable | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Deactivated alias behaviour | Silently discards | Silently discards | Hard SMTP 550 |
| Per-alias spam attribution | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Leak alerts naming the sender | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
What addy.io does better
- Open source and self-hostable. The strongest argument, and one we can't answer. You can read the code, and if you don't want to trust anyone's infrastructure you can run your own instance. For a privacy tool that's a meaningful property, not a checkbox.
- Price. €3/month for Pro, and a free tier that already includes unlimited standard aliases.
- Reply and send from aliases on paid plans. We don't support this at all.
- GPG encryption of forwarded mail, including the subject line — genuinely unusual, and useful if you're forwarding into Gmail or Outlook and would rather they couldn't read it.
- Browser extensions and open-source mobile apps on both platforms.
- Multiple recipients per alias, and a developer API.
- No domain required. The username subdomain (
anything@you.addy.io) gives on-the-fly aliases free.
On breadth of capability per euro, addy.io wins this comparison. It would be silly to argue otherwise.
Where we differ
Disable behaviour — the concrete difference
addy.io's own documentation is explicit: deactivate an alias and "we then silently discard new mail to it", with the suggestion to delete the alias instead if you want senders to get a bounce.
We reject with an SMTP 550 by default. That matters because mailing platforms treat repeated hard bounces as a reason to suppress an address — so the rejection does some of your unsubscribing for you, and a real person who mistyped gets a delivery failure rather than silence. We also still log the blocked attempts, so you can see who kept trying after you cut them off. Why bounce beats drop
addy.io can produce a bounce too — you just have to delete rather than deactivate, which on a catch-all domain has its own consequence. Delete vs disable
Attribution
Both services mask your address well. Only one tracks what happened to it: per-alias spam statistics, an alert naming the new sender's domain when an alias is first contacted by someone other than the original company, and a running Data Sellers list. With addy.io you can work this out by noticing which alias got hit; we do the noticing.
No subscription
Our software is free and the domain is the only cost. Against addy.io's €3/month that's a smaller saving than against most competitors — and addy.io buys you replies and extensions with it.
Who should pick which
| If you… | Choose |
|---|---|
| Want open source, or to self-host | addy.io |
| Need to reply from an alias | addy.io Pro |
| Want GPG-encrypted forwarding | addy.io |
| Want a browser extension | addy.io |
| Don't want to own a domain | addy.io (username subdomain) |
| Want disabled aliases to bounce by default | Don't SPAM Me |
| Want spam attribution done for you | Don't SPAM Me |
| Want no subscription at all | Don't SPAM Me |
The verdict
This is the comparison where we're closest to a genuine peer, and where the honest recommendation most often isn't us. If you value open source, want to reply from aliases, or want the option to self-host, addy.io is the better product and it's inexpensive.
Choose us if attribution is the feature you actually want, or if you specifically want senders to hit a wall rather than a void when you cut them off.
Both put aliases on a domain you own if you want them to, so neither locks you in at the namespace level — the property that matters most long-term. Why
More: every service compared · vs SimpleLogin