1. Yes, each Pony account is a new email address @pony.gg. I think of this as a feature. You start with a brand new space separate from your existing world of instantaneous messaging. Of course you can use it for anything, but the idea behind Pony is it provides a special place for your correspondence, so starting blank and with a fully fledged, separate email account is what made sense to me. There are other services that let you do similar things with existing email providers but that didn’t make sense to me: if you can still get and send mail at any time by circumventing these wrapping services, you need to exercise mental discipline to obtain the sort of experience Pony provides without any cognitive load at all (which is the whole point).

I considered adding a contact import feature but decided to collect feedback first.

2. The business model is TBD, with users being the requisite first step for any business model. But user privacy is paramount and the privacy policy lists all third parties (currently only Google Analytics, and at that, proxied through Pony so you the user do not expose yourself to Google and we get less information as a result). We’re free now and would like to continue offering a free tier in the future without turning our users into the product at the expense of their privacy. That seems possible to me!

3. Improving and expanding the home page. Thank you for this feedback.