We’ve made a difficult call: Burner Mail is removing the public Free plan and moving forward with a paid-only offering.
Not exactly the kind of announcement anyone loves making. But it’s the right one.
For a long time, the Free plan helped people try Burner Mail, protect their inbox, and see the value of burner addresses without paying upfront. We liked that. It made the product easy to discover, and plenty of our earliest users came in that way.
But over time, the Free plan also created problems we couldn’t ignore.
Temporary email services attract abuse. That’s just the reality of the category. Some people use burner addresses for privacy, which is what we built Burner Mail for. Others use them for spam, fraud, throwaway signups, and behavior that hurts the reliability of the service for everyone else. And when abuse grows, it doesn’t stay neatly contained. It affects email delivery, infrastructure costs, domain reputation, support time, and the overall quality of the product.
In plain English: free accounts were making it harder to provide the level of service our serious users expect.
Burner Mail is not just a landing page with a few fake addresses behind it. We handle forwarding, mailboxes, custom domains, replies, delivery, abuse prevention, and account security. All of that has to work reliably. If an email alias doesn’t forward properly, or a mailbox is slow, or a domain reputation gets damaged, that’s not a small inconvenience. That’s the whole product failing at its job.
So we’re choosing focus.
By removing the public Free plan, we can spend more time and resources on the people who rely on Burner Mail every day. Better deliverability. Better support. Better infrastructure. Less abuse. Fewer weird edge cases caused by people creating disposable accounts for the wrong reasons.
Existing free users will keep their current free limits. We’re not pulling the rug out from under people who already have accounts. But new users will need to upgrade before creating burners or mailboxes.
We know this won’t please everyone. Fair enough. But privacy tools need to be sustainable if they’re going to be trustworthy. A service like Burner Mail costs money to run well, and we’d rather be honest about that than quietly let quality slide.
Thanks for understanding, and thanks for supporting Burner Mail.
