Email Alias Services Compared: addy.io vs SimpleLogin

Email alias services solve one specific problem: you want to hand out an address that is not your real one. The alias forwards to your actual inbox, the sender never learns your real address, and you can disable a single alias the moment it starts attracting spam without touching your main account.

Three services are worth serious consideration in 2026. This comparison uses each provider’s published pricing and documentation, retrieved in August 2026, and links every figure to its source. This site has no affiliate relationship with any of them.

What aliases do, and what they do not

An alias service is not encrypted email. It does not protect message content. It rewrites the envelope: mail sent to your alias arrives at the service, which strips the original recipient, rewrites headers and forwards it to your real mailbox. Replies can be routed back out through the alias so your real address never appears in the thread.

This is genuinely useful for:

• Signing up to a service without surrendering your real address
• Creating one address per service, so when a breach or a broker list surfaces, you know exactly which company leaked you
• Receiving mail from strangers — marketplace listings, contractors, landlords — without exposing your identity
• Killing a spam source in one click instead of filtering it forever

It does nothing about a threat that already knows your real address, and nothing about interception of message content. For that you want encrypted email, which is a separate layer. The two compose well: alias to receive, encrypted provider to read.

At a glance

	addy.io	SimpleLogin	Firefox Relay
Operator	Addy Pty Ltd, servers in Amsterdam	Proton (acquired 2022), Switzerland	Mozilla, United States
Free aliases	Unlimited standard, plus 10 shared-domain	10 total	5 masks
Free bandwidth	10 MB/month	Unlimited	Not published as a cap
Entry paid plan	Lite, $1/mo billed yearly	Premium, $36/yr or $4/mo	Relay Premium
Top paid plan	Pro, $3/mo billed yearly	Premium (single tier)	Relay Premium (single tier)
Custom domains	0 free / 1 Lite / 20 Pro	Unlimited on Premium	None
Catch-all	Yes, on subdomains and custom domains	Yes, on custom domains	No
Reply from alias	Yes	Yes	Paid plans
Open source	Yes	Yes	Yes
Self-hostable	Yes	Yes	No

addy.io

addy.io is the service formerly published as AnonAddy — the GitHub repositories still carry the old name, and a lot of older writing on the subject has not caught up. It is open source, self-hostable, and run by a small operation with its mail infrastructure hosted in Amsterdam with Greenhost.

Pricing and limits, taken directly from addy.io’s pricing table:

	Free	Lite	Pro
Price	$0/mo	$1/mo billed yearly	$3/mo billed yearly ($4 monthly)
Standard aliases	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Shared-domain aliases	10	50	Unlimited
Recipients	1	5	30
Custom domains	0	1	20
Additional usernames	0	5	20
Monthly bandwidth	10 MB	100 MB	Unlimited

The structure rewards understanding one distinction. Shared-domain aliases use addy.io’s own domains and are capped. Standard aliases live on a subdomain assigned to you — anything@you.anonaddy.com — are unlimited on every plan including free, and work as a catch-all, so you never pre-create them. You invent the address at the moment you need it and it simply works.

The real constraint on the free tier is bandwidth, not alias count. Per addy.io’s FAQ, 10 MB per month works out to roughly 140 forwarded emails; the Lite plan’s 100 MB is around 1,400. Newsletters with images and anything carrying attachments burn through that faster than plain text. Alias creation is also rate-limited — 10 per hour on Free, 20 on Lite, 50 on Pro — and there is a maximum of 10 recipients per individual alias across all plans.

Privacy posture: minimal data retention, with forwarded mail not stored after delivery. Mail infrastructure sits in the Netherlands, inside the EU, which is a materially better jurisdiction for email privacy than the United States.

The catch: the unlimited free aliases share one visible subdomain. Every service you sign up to sees you.anonaddy.com, which links those aliases to each other even though it does not reveal your real address. If the goal is that two accounts cannot be correlated, that shared subdomain undermines it, and you want a custom domain — which means a paid plan.

For the working detail — the two alias types, replying and sending from an alias and the two ways that fails, per-recipient PGP forwarding, and the Duo and Family plans — see the addy.io guide.

SimpleLogin

SimpleLogin was acquired by Proton in 2022 and now sits inside the Proton ecosystem, with Swiss jurisdiction and Proton’s infrastructure behind it. It remains open source and self-hostable.

Per SimpleLogin’s pricing page as of August 2026:

• Free: 10 aliases, unlimited bandwidth, 1 mailbox, browser extensions and mobile apps. Bundled with Proton Pass free — unlimited logins and devices.
• Premium: $36/year, or $4 billed monthly. Unlimited aliases, unlimited custom domains with catch-all, 5 subdomains, 50 directories, unlimited mailboxes, PGP encryption of forwarded mail, and sending from an alias. Now bundles Proton Pass premium, including vault sharing, a built-in 2FA authenticator and dark web monitoring.

Two features stand out. Directories let you generate an alias inline without pre-creating it, in the form yourword.yourdirectory@simplelogin.co, which is the same on-the-fly convenience addy.io gets from subdomain catch-all. PGP forwarding encrypts messages to your public key before they reach your mailbox, which closes a gap every other service on this page leaves open: normally the alias provider can read forwarded mail in transit through its systems.

Privacy posture: Swiss jurisdiction and Proton’s operational track record, which is the strongest in consumer privacy tooling. The trade-off is concentration — if you also use Proton Mail, Proton VPN and Proton Pass, then one company holds your mail, your traffic, your credentials and your aliases. That is a larger single point of failure than most people intend to build.

The catch: the free tier at 10 total aliases is genuinely limiting, and it is a lifetime cap rather than a monthly allowance. Premium is triple addy.io Lite’s price. It is excellent value if you count the bundled Proton Pass premium, and mediocre value if you do not want a password manager.

Firefox Relay

Mozilla’s entry is the simplest of the three and the most limited. The free tier gives you 5 email masks plus a browser extension and email tracker removal. Relay Premium adds unlimited masks, a unique Relay subdomain, the ability to reply anonymously, and promotional email blocking. A separate tier adds phone number masking, available only in the United States and Canada.

A note on pricing: as of August 2026 Mozilla’s own Relay Premium page shows waitlist sign-up rather than a checkout price for the premium tiers, so the free tier’s 5-mask limit is the only figure this page will state as confirmed. Check Mozilla directly for current paid rates before planning around them.

Privacy posture: Mozilla is a non-profit foundation with a longer public commitment to privacy than either competitor, and the service is open source. It is operated from the United States, which has weaker statutory email privacy protection than the EU or Switzerland — a real consideration for a service that by design sees every message forwarded to you.

The catch: no custom domains, no catch-all, and a 5-mask free tier that is exhausted almost immediately by anyone using aliases seriously. It is best understood as a convenience feature for Firefox users rather than a full alias strategy.

Verdict

Overall pick: addy.io for most people. SimpleLogin if you are already inside Proton.

• addy.io wins on price, capability per dollar, and the free tier. Unlimited standard aliases with subdomain catch-all on a free account is not matched anywhere, Lite at $12 a year buys a custom domain for less than any competitor, and the EU hosting is a better jurisdiction than the US alternative. Budget realistically for bandwidth: if you forward newsletters or attachments, the free tier’s 10 MB will not carry you and Lite is the actual starting point.
• SimpleLogin wins on integration and on PGP forwarding. If you already pay Proton, it is effectively free and the workflow between aliases and mailbox is seamless. PGP-encrypted forwarding is the only feature here that stops the alias provider itself from being able to read your mail, and for a sensitive threat model that alone justifies the price. Weigh the concentration risk of putting mail, VPN, passwords and aliases with one company.
• Firefox Relay wins on simplicity. Five free masks, one click, inside a browser you may already use. It is the right answer for someone who wants a throwaway address twice a year and the wrong answer for anyone building a per-service address discipline.

The rule of thumb: free tier for occasional use, addy.io Lite for a serious per-service discipline on your own domain, SimpleLogin Premium if the Proton bundle already makes sense for you.

What none of them solve

Alias services protect your identity from the companies you sign up to. They do not protect your correspondence from surveillance once the message lands in your real inbox. If your real inbox is Gmail, Google still processes every forwarded message, and the alias has bought you compartmentalisation, not confidentiality.

They also do not fix metadata. Your alias provider necessarily sees who wrote to you and when, and — unless you enable PGP forwarding, which SimpleLogin reserves for Premium and addy.io offers on every tier — what they wrote. You have moved trust rather than eliminated it, which is a reasonable trade so long as it is deliberate.

If your real inbox is Gmail, that trade is worth pricing honestly: is Gmail encrypted sets out exactly what Google can still read once the forwarded message lands.

For genuine end-to-end privacy, pair an alias service with a private mail provider: alias to receive, encrypted provider to read. Once you have picked a service, our alias setup guide covers building the per-service discipline that makes the whole arrangement worth the effort, and why your email ends up on data broker lists explains what you are defending against. If you would rather answer a few questions, the find-your-setup wizard assembles the provider, alias and migration plan together.

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