SimpleLogin Free is useful enough that most people shouldn't pay on day one. It gives you 10 aliases, unlimited forwarding bandwidth, replies from an alias, one destination mailbox, browser extensions, and mobile apps. There's also a seven-day Premium trial that doesn't require a card.
Ten aliases may sound restrictive, but they're enough to find out whether you'll actually create a different address for every account. If you end up using one alias for shopping, another for newsletters, and a few for sites you don't fully trust, Free may cover the job indefinitely.
Premium starts making sense when aliases stop being occasional burner addresses and become the way you organize email.
What the $36 annual plan changes
SimpleLogin Premium costs $36 per year or $4 when billed monthly. It removes the alias limit and adds unlimited custom domains, unlimited mailboxes, catch-all domains, five SimpleLogin subdomains, 50 directories or usernames, PGP encryption, and the ability to start a new conversation from an alias through a reverse alias. The subscription also includes Proton Pass premium features.
An eleventh alias alone doesn't justify Premium. The plan earns its price if you want a separate address for nearly every account without stopping to ration them.
When an address starts receiving junk, you can disable that alias without changing the email attached to every other account. A leaked alias also tells you which service had that address. Premium's extra mailboxes and domain tools matter if aliases need to feed different inboxes, or if you want addresses for a household or small operation without moving the underlying inboxes.
Catch-all support saves a trip to the dashboard. With your own domain, you can use a new address at signup and let SimpleLogin create it when mail arrives. Directories provide a similar on-the-fly workflow on SimpleLogin's domains.
A custom domain is the strongest reason to pay
Aliases on a SimpleLogin-owned domain depend on SimpleLogin continuing to operate that domain. The service can export account data and aliases, but a CSV file cannot make those addresses work at another provider.
A domain you own gives you a better exit. You can change its DNS records and move future mail handling elsewhere. That makes Premium more defensible for aliases attached to accounts you expect to keep for years.
There are two catches. You still have to buy and renew the domain separately, and DNS setup adds work. A personal domain can also make supposedly separate aliases easier to associate with one another because every address shares the same text after the @ sign. Privacy Guides specifically warns about that correlation risk for single-user domains.
So a custom domain improves provider portability, but it doesn't automatically improve anonymity.
The privacy tradeoff does not disappear
SimpleLogin is a forwarding layer, not a mailbox. Messages pass through it on the way to your real inbox. Its privacy policy says successfully delivered email is not stored, while undeliverable messages can be kept for seven days. The service can still access email metadata such as sender, recipient, originating IP address, subject, and timestamps. It also scans unencrypted incoming messages for spam and viruses.
PGP forwarding on Premium can encrypt a message before it reaches the final mailbox provider, which reduces what that provider can read. It does not make the original sender's unencrypted message invisible to the relay that receives and processes it.
There's also a 25 MB maximum message size. That probably won't matter for account confirmations or newsletters, but it can matter if you use an alias for attachment-heavy conversations.
Reasons to stay free or use something else
Stay on SimpleLogin Free if 10 aliases cover your real behavior. Replies already work on Free, and forwarding bandwidth is unlimited. Paying only to collect unused aliases is still subscription waste.
Addy.io is the most direct lower-cost alternative. Its Free plan offers unlimited standard aliases, one recipient, and 10 MB of monthly bandwidth. Its Lite plan costs $12 per year and adds one custom domain, five recipients, and 100 MB of monthly bandwidth. The lower price comes with tighter bandwidth and sending limits, so the better deal depends on how much mail and how many attachments you relay.
Technical users can self-host SimpleLogin because its server and client code are open source. That exchanges the subscription for a server, a domain, updates, monitoring, deliverability work, and your own time. It is an ownership option, not a zero-cost shortcut.
What happens if you cancel
If a Premium subscription ends, existing aliases, domains, directories, and mailboxes stay in place, and existing aliases continue receiving and sending mail. You cannot add new ones, and catch-all or directory addresses cannot be created on the fly once you're over the Free limit. SimpleLogin says it does not refund the normal subscription because users get the trial first.
That downgrade policy makes an annual experiment less risky. You won't have to replace 100 account addresses on the day you cancel, although your alias system will stop expanding.
There is also a $199 Proton Pass plus SimpleLogin lifetime plan with no renewals and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Against the current $36 annual price, the sixth annual payment would take subscription spending to $216. That comparison ignores the time value of money and the risk that your needs or the product change. A lifetime license is sensible only if you expect to use both the alias service and Proton Pass for well beyond five years.
Verdict
SimpleLogin Premium is worth $36 a year for someone who creates a unique alias for most accounts, needs custom-domain portability, routes mail to several inboxes, or relies on catch-all and directory creation. Those are recurring workflows, not decorative upgrades.
For everyone else, start with the no-card trial and then stay free until the 10-alias limit causes an actual problem. If all you need is a larger pool of basic aliases, Addy.io may solve it for less. Paying for SimpleLogin becomes easy to justify when the custom domain and mailbox controls matter, not merely when alias number 11 appears.
Source: r/softwaresworthpaying · by /u/Savings-Arrival-7817