SimpleLogin Review (2026): Strong, Cheap, and Proton-Owned

SimpleLogin is the best-known dedicated email alias service, and after a day spent re-reading its pages we think the reputation is mostly deserved. The free plan is a real product rather than a demo, the paid plan costs less than almost anything comparable, the entire codebase is public, and the policy for what happens when you stop paying is both generous and written down. It also belongs to Proton now, which changes the calculation in ways worth thinking through carefully.

Before anything else, a disclosure. We run YeyMail, a competing alias service, and you are reading this review on our blog. We believe we can be fair, and every factual claim below was checked against SimpleLogin's own pages on 14 August 2026, but you should weigh a competitor's review accordingly and confirm anything that matters to you on their site.

With that on the table, this is a review of SimpleLogin on its own terms: what it is, what the free and paid plans actually contain, what its documentation promises when a subscription lapses, and where the honest caveats sit.

What SimpleLogin is, and who owns it

SimpleLogin sits between your real mailbox and the sites that want your address. You hand out an alias, mail sent to it is forwarded to your inbox, and when an alias starts attracting spam you switch it off. If the model is new to you, our explainer on what an email alias is covers the mechanics; SimpleLogin is one of the oldest and most complete implementations of it, with browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari and apps for iOS and Android.

The ownership is stated plainly on their own pages: SimpleLogin "is the product of Proton AG, registered in Switzerland", and the pricing page carries the same line. The company joined Proton in April 2022, moved its legal domicile to Switzerland at the start of 2024, and the integration has kept deepening since. SimpleLogin premium now bundles Proton Pass premium features, and even the free plan lists Proton Pass free among its contents.

That ownership cuts both ways. On one side, resources and longevity: an alias service is only useful if it outlives the accounts you attach it to, and backed by one of the largest privacy companies in Europe, SimpleLogin is about as unlikely to disappear as anything in this niche. On the other side, concentration: aliasing exists to spread your identity across parties, and if your mailbox is Proton Mail, your passwords live in Proton Pass and your aliases run through SimpleLogin, then a single company operates every layer of your setup. Neither reading is wrong. Which one weighs more depends on how much of your stack already lives with Proton.

The free plan is a real product

The free tier gives you ten aliases at no cost, and, unusually for this category, replies work. The pricing page lists "Reply from alias" on the free plan alongside one mailbox, the browser extensions, the mobile apps, two-factor authentication with TOTP or a WebAuthn key, and what the page describes as unlimited bandwidth. Their FAQ goes further on sending: "There's no limits on the number of sends/replies."

Replying is the detail worth dwelling on, because it is where most free tiers stop. Firefox Relay, for instance, forwards on its free plan but reserves replying for premium, a distinction we cover in our post on Firefox Relay's limits. A forward-only alias is fine for newsletters; the moment a human writes to you, it becomes a trap, because answering from your real account gives the address away. SimpleLogin's free plan avoids that trap entirely.

The constraints are the ten-alias ceiling and the single mailbox: every alias delivers to one destination, and there are no custom domains. For protecting the handful of accounts that matter most, ten aliases with working replies is genuinely enough.

Premium at $36 a year

We re-verified the price today: premium costs $36 a year, or $4 a month if you prefer monthly billing. For a category where paid plans are the norm, that is at the cheap end, and the list of what it unlocks is long.

The custom domain support is the headline for anyone serious about aliasing, because addresses on a domain you own survive any provider. Premium includes a catch-all mode, which we explain in general terms in catch-all email explained: any address at your domain becomes an alias the moment someone writes to it, no setup per address.

One clarification on PGP, because the marketing shorthand can mislead. Their homepage says emails are "encrypted with your own PGP key before being forwarded to your mailbox". That is accurate and useful: mail sits encrypted in your inbox. But the encryption happens on SimpleLogin's servers, which necessarily handle the message in the clear first. That is a property of every forwarding service, theirs and ours alike, and it is not end-to-end encryption from the sender.

Open source and self-hosting

This is a genuine strength and a rare one. Their site states that "all SimpleLogin components are also open source", covering both the server and the client code: extensions, mobile apps, the lot. For a service that sits in the path of your email, the ability for anyone to read the code that handles your mail is worth more than any marketing page.

They also describe themselves as "the only email forwarding solution that can be self-hosted", with published instructions and most components running as Docker containers. The "only" is their word and we would not press on it, but the substance stands: a determined administrator can run the entire stack on their own hardware. In practice, self-hosting a mail service is hard, and deliverability from a residential or small VPS setup is a constant fight, so for most individuals this is less a plan than an exit route. It is still a meaningful one. If Proton ever changed the service in ways you disliked, the code would remain.

What happens when you stop paying

Lapse policies are where alias services quietly differ most, because your aliases are commitments other people hold, printed on accounts and forms you no longer control. SimpleLogin's policy is generous and, more importantly, documented. Their pricing FAQ states: "All aliases/domains/directories/mailboxes you have created are kept and continue working normally." What you lose is the ability to grow: no new aliases beyond the free ten, no new domains, directories or mailboxes.

We compared the category's lapse behaviour in what happens if you stop paying, and SimpleLogin's policy is among the best we found: existing infrastructure keeps working rather than being held hostage. That it is written down in a public FAQ matters even more than the generosity, because a policy that exists only in support tickets can change without anyone noticing.

The caveats

None of these are disqualifying. They are the points where the picture is less tidy than the pricing page, drawn from their own documentation and from what that documentation leaves unsaid.

• The independent audit is dated. Their security page is detailed and creditable, covering strict SPF, DKIM on all outbound mail, MTA-STS, DANE, an encrypted-at-rest database and seven-day backup deletion, and their blog records a third-party audit by Securitum in June 2022 that found no critical vulnerability. The security page itself does not mention that audit, and we found no record of a more recent one, so the independent verification on file is now four years old.
• The word "anonymous" oversells the plumbing. Their privacy policy is admirably specific: emails are not stored and are "deleted from SimpleLogin server as soon as it reaches its destination", there are no permanent IP logs by default, and system logs are deleted within 30 days. But a forwarding service necessarily sees sender, recipient, subject line and timing in transit, and their policy says so. Aliasing is pseudonymous, not anonymous.
• The Proton coupling is deepening, not static. Nothing on their pages commits to SimpleLogin remaining a standalone product, and the direction of travel since 2022, from the Swiss domicile to Proton Pass bundling in both tiers, points toward tighter integration. If your reason for aliasing is to keep layers of your identity with separate parties, check how much of your setup is already Proton before adding another piece.
• The free plan's single mailbox means all ten aliases deliver to the same destination; routing different aliases to different inboxes is a premium feature.
• Some questions their pages simply do not answer. Neither the pricing page nor the FAQ says whether deleting an alias frees up a slot against the ten-alias free limit, and the lapse FAQ does not spell out which premium-only settings, such as PGP, remain active on a lapsed account. Where a page is silent, assume nothing.

Who should choose it

Most people shopping in this category should try SimpleLogin's free plan, and many should stop there. If you want a free tier that genuinely works, replies included; if open source matters to you; if you already live in the Proton ecosystem and the bundling reads as a bonus rather than a concentration; or if you want the cheapest credible path to aliases on your own domain, SimpleLogin is a sound choice and arguably the default one. Our own comparison of alias services reaches much the same conclusion.

Look elsewhere in fewer cases. If you specifically want your alias layer held by a different company from your mailbox, and your mailbox is Proton Mail, the concentration argument applies to you most directly. If you are all-in on Apple and only want random burner addresses, iCloud's built-in option may be enough, with the constraints we describe in Apple Hide My Email's limitations. And if you need contractual assurances such as a SOC 2 report, no consumer alias service we know of publishes one, SimpleLogin included.

How it compares with what we build

Briefly, since this is their review and not our pitch. YeyMail has no free tier, and SimpleLogin's free plan is better than our absence of one, full stop. We charge from $0.99 a month, with a free 7-day trial that needs no card. Where we differ is in the failure modes: our kill switch refuses mail at SMTP time, is never paywalled, and keeps working after you cancel; replies need no setup because the reply address is rewritten on every forward, though Reply All is our documented exception: the other people on a thread sit in your mail app as ordinary addresses, so replies to them go out from your real account; and our post-cancellation state is spelled out in the same detail we asked of them, with shared-domain aliases continuing to forward up to 20 messages a day indefinitely. On pure lapse generosity, their "continue working normally" beats our capped forwarding, and we would rather say so than be caught not saying so. We also qualify our alias counts: unlimited only on domains you own, 500 or 5,000 on our shared domain depending on plan.

The honest summary is that SimpleLogin earned its position. It is cheap, open, documented and backed by a company that will still exist in a decade. The questions it leaves you with are about concentration and the unstated corners of its documentation, not about whether the product works.