Results of the Tutanota survey

Recently we commenced a survey on Tutanota, what you expect from Tutanota, why you switched to our service, the features you would like to see next as well as future potential for additions and updates to our secure email and calendar service. We were amazed by the number of people replying; so thank you! 🙏

From the start, the community has driven our development decisions. As an independent, privacy-first company, we do not have to bow to investor's or advertiser's wishes. The only ones we are committed to are our users

So let's dive into the results of our survey and explore what our users expect from us!

Most used clients

Tutanota is a fully encrypted email and calendar service that comes as a web client, Android and iOS apps as well as desktop clients for Linux, Windows and macOS - all published as open source.

As there is absolutely no tracking in Tutanota, it is interesting for us to know what clients are used to what extend. As it turns out, most users - more than 75% - check their emails on their phones daily or weekly.

Our desktop clients for Windows, macOS and Linux are used by more than half of our users at least weekly. The web client is not used as much. However, occasionally almost everyone uses the web client to login to their Tutanota mailbox.

As a result, we can say that all Tutanota clients, mobile, desktop and web are equally important. We will continue our approach to develop all clients simultaneously and keep the clients as similarly to each other as possible, not just in appearance, but also in regards to features!

For instance, our recent implementation of conversation view works not only on desktop, but also on mobile, making the use of Tutanota much more convenient as email conversations are accessible easier on all devices.

The same is true for U2F support - the most secure option for login protection with two-factor authentication - which is supported by all Tutanota apps.

Most important Tutanota characteristics

We also wanted to know what you like about Tutanota and what you associate with Tutanota as a product and as a brand.

Based on your experience, how would you apply the following attributes to Tutanota?

Here we see very well that our high level of security with built-in encryption is highly appreciated by our users: To almost all respondents, Tutanota is secure as well as "a brand I can trust". This result is particularly important as "trust" becomes more and more important when deciding what online services to use.

Future development

One of the most important questions to our users is, of course, what features are missing in Tutanota and should be added next. In 2020, most people mentioned that they would love to see the following features (multiple answers were possible):

• tags / labels / subfolders (35%)
• conversation view (33,3%)
• out-of-office notifications (33%)
• offline support (25,5%)
• import (23,2%)

By now, most of these features, namely subfolders, conversation view, auto-responders and offline support are already available!

What's more, we are now working on email import and we even have a running prototype by now! Tags and labels are also planned usability features for the future.

Since most of what you asked for in our last survey is done now, we asked what you would like to see next with new options:

Feature requests: Question 1

"In your opinion, what are the most important features in Tutanota? The listed features are currently available or planned for the near future."

• Search Mailbox (47.54%)
• Drive (34.83%)
• Subfolders (33.45%)
• Organize emails by tags/labels (31.92%)
• Offline support (31.08%)
• Sending large attachments (27.98%)
• Contacts (26.90%)
• Email archiving (26.60%)
• UI/Design update (26.01%)

Multiple answers were possible; that's why the sum is more than 100%.

Based on these responses we will keep investing in existing features such as improve search, enable write-access in offline mode, but also add new features such as tags and labels.

In addition, we are currently looking for a designer as well as software developers; so be sure to check our open positions if you are interested to work with us on improving Tutanota!

Feature requests: Question 2

"If we were able to work on only ONE feature for the next three months, which would be the most important one to you?"

• Update to post-quantum encryption (19.41%)
• Improve search (18.32%)
• Enable adjustment of layout (increase/reduce size of email list, email content) (13.82%)
• Add Drive (13.11%)
• UI / design improvements (12.02%)
• Improve speed (9.51%)
• Enable sending large attachments (8.80%)
• Add Note taking app (5.01%)

Here only one answer was possible so the sum is ~100%.

The two most important features to our security-sensitive users is updating our encryption algorithms to post-quantum secure ones as well as improve our secure search on encrypted data. Both of these are massive and complex tasks so we will see how we can integrate these into our development plan. Please check the roadmap for upcoming changes.

Premium extensions

In our discussions with users we frequently get the feedback that our pricing model which lets you flexibly add extensions such as larger storage and alias packages is too complex and confusing. In addition, people overwhelmingly want the Premium plan to have more storage included by default, compared to the Free plan. Another regular request we get in support is that each additional user should get additional storage automatically upon booking.

People do acknowledge that with our current Premium and Teams subscriptions for 1 and 4 euros per month respectively, the value they get is very good, but our current subscription packages are too complex and it is not intuitive that additional users do not get additional storage automatically.

That's why in our survey we asked a couple of questions regarding how much storage people wanted and how much they would be willing to pay for larger storage packages. For instance, on average respondents were willing to pay 3 euros per month for 20 GB of storage per user.

Based on this feedback, we are now in the process of revising our pricing strategy and the plans we offer.

Regardless of the outcome, we can assure you that subscribers of any current Tutanota plan can stay on their currently chosen plan at the current price - even when it renews.

Future outlook

Our growing development team works hard to add new features on a monthly, sometimes even weekly basis. We also plan to increase our team by at least six more developers this year to speed up development further.

We are very thankful to our awesome community who helps us achieve this continuous growth. We grow organically according to the rising number of paying users.

Thank you for your support! 🙂