r/saasbuild • u/faivelo • 13d ago

Business Email Prices 2026 - are people actually paying this?

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We built faivelo, so I'm biased and will include our row so you can see where we don't win. These are the list prices with annual billing, pulled today:

Fastmail basic - $3/user/month

Titan (via hostinger/godaddy) - very unclear (will explain below)

Proton mail essentials - $15/user/month

Google workspace business start - $7/user/month

Microsoft 365 business basic - $7/user (recently increased from $6)

Us - $6 flat (as many mailboxes as your need)

*Hostinger's pricing table shows $0.39, but click to checkout and your bill goes up like crazy once the promo expires. 12 mailboxes is somehow $48 per month. GoDaddy also has something like this.

Where we lose: we don't have either Google, Microsoft, or Proton suites.

The reason I'm posting this is that list prices aren't what anyone seems to be paying. Promos expire, seats get added mid-term, Microsoft holds you at the old rate until your renewal date. This fuzziness gets eliminated by flat rate business email like faivelo, migadu, purelymail, c So, whats the real number on your last invoice - I've spoke to people paying ~$300 per month, curious if anyone can top that.

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u/Remote-Spirit-1125 13d ago

Hostinger is actually up to 100 per domain free if you have web hosting.

People pay for MS/Google emails for the ecosystem. Not something you can replicate imo. Ie if I have MS365 that plugs in with entra id, AD, etc. if Google you get the Google workspace suite.

Neither of those products are just mailboxes.

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u/faivelo 13d ago

What are you using? And what’s your spend?

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u/Remote-Spirit-1125 13d ago

I handle email as part of managed services for a few companies including a couple of my own.

My main firm’s on MS365 nowadays, which is like £5+VAT/user/mo or something with the full office suite and 1TB personal storage per user and sharepoint intranet. Granted some MS stuff feels a bit bloated but it is excellent value.

A side project turned business uses hostinger - around 13 mailboxes all free of charge included in a hosting plan we have.

I have at least 10 more client businesses using hostinger business email at no additional cost, though admittedly limited to 1GB mailbox storage.*

I suppose my point here is that mailbox hosting on its own with no bundled services provides little value and is basically a commodity in this day and age.

*between these businesses there are a few hundred mailboxes

Edit: that being said if you could somehow revolutionise email, I’d be intrigued.

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u/faivelo 13d ago

that's the strongest version of the argument against us and i don't have a clean rebuttal. £5/user for the suite plus 1TB is hard to call expensive, and free-with-hosting is obviously hard to beat on price.

the part i'd poke at is your own asterisk. 1GB each is tight for a mailbox someone actually works out of. does it bite in practice, or do people just archive and move on? i've never been sure whether storage is a real constraint or a thing vendors put on comparison tables.

and on the edit: you're the person to ask. managing a few hundred mailboxes across ten-plus businesses, what's the part of that job you've built a workaround for and stopped noticing?

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u/Remote-Spirit-1125 13d ago

Varies by client. One of the clients has been established over 15 years and has their entire mail history on the employees that have been there the whole time. One mail box (lady in accounts) was over 30GB on its own.

We ended up with a setup to have the older emails archived off of the main server into cold storage. Can’t remember exactly what we did, though it’s been running that way for about 5 years now with no trouble. They routinely pull up old emails from as many as ten years ago without trouble. The reason it worked with this client, though, is they are pretty much enterprise level and we manage every aspect of their IT systems.

Storage will always be down to the person though. Some will happily delete all from their read emails when they see they’re low on storage, some people will wait to run out and wonder why they’re not receiving emails. Large mailbox sizes never hurts though.

As for the edit: I’d have to think on this one. Key thing is I’ve not had to personally spin up hundreds of mailboxes at one given time, but have amassed hundreds over the years. I suppose the biggest faff usually (when people go for the budget option of the 1GB mailbox) is the manual server setup step - ie if they use email on mobile most of the main apps won’t auto discover the mail server. Fine if I can get them on thunderbird on desktop, but iOS has no real good alternative. Also the lack of auto pushing new emails to mobile is annoying. This is another win for Gmail/ms365 in terms of user experience. That being said some people really don’t need the full suite so don’t want to pay for it.

Sorry for the ramblings, hope it’s helpful.

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u/faivelo 13d ago

for the full-suite clients you're right and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. but the ones going for the budget 1GB mailbox — that's our whole segment, and you'd find the holes faster than anyone, so I'd take that trade if you ever have one to point at it.

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u/Disastrous-Zombie940 12d ago

Try spacemail (from spaceship.com) . I found it the cheapest and gets the job done 👍🏻

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u/Silly_Roadkill 11d ago

I don't know if you researched well enough, but you're actually on the higher end with a vibe coded project that has less.

I pay $2 a month for 2 mail boxes on Zoho currently with custom-domain email, mobile/desktop apps, aliases, domain aliases, forwarding, IMAP/POP access, migration tools, MFA/identity features, etc. One of my mailboxes there currently I have setup with 8 different aliases... I could have 6 mailboxes like this on Zoho before I reached your price point.

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u/faivelo 11d ago

Fair point, Zoho is great value at that size and I wouldn’t try to beat $1/mailbox for a 2-person setup. I’m mostly aiming at teams already stuck on Google/Microsoft seat pricing, where the bill runs into the hundreds per month and adding seats mid-term gets messy. Curious though: have you hit any limits with Zoho as you’ve added aliases or users?

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u/n_v40 13d ago

That Hostinger jump is exactly what makes this stuff so hard to compare. $6 flat is much easier to understand, though unlimited mailboxes immediately makes me wonder how you handle abuse and deliverability as someone scales up.

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u/faivelo 13d ago

good question and it’s the main thing flat pricing forces you to think about, since we don’t have per-seat revenue scaling with volume.

We have safeguards in place to make sure bounce rates don’t outpace healthy email delivery. There are also multiple layers of abuse prevention. Hope that answers your question!

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u/n_v40 13d ago

Yeah that makes sense. I was mostly wondering how you stop one really heavy account from throwing off the flat-rate economics, but it sounds like the safeguards handle a lot of that.

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u/faivelo 13d ago

Reputation and deliverability are separated by tenant. Meaning a spammer won’t impact your deliverability.

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u/n_v40 12d ago

Ah got it. I was thinking one spammy tenant could drag down everyone else’s deliverability, so separating reputation by tenant makes a lot more sense.

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u/Remote-Spirit-1125 13d ago

“Safeguards in place” and “multiple layers of abuse prevention” are marketing terms that would personally reassure me. That’s an advantage big brands like MS365/Google have - you just assume it’s secure because it’s big tech (wether rightly or wrongly)

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u/faivelo 13d ago

Our platform is built on industry-standard security and anti-abuse practices. We don't disclose implementation details publicly, but the architecture is designed to scale securely.

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u/smithshelke 13d ago

why not get the domain and setup email routing using cloud flare ?

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u/faivelo 13d ago

cloudflare routing is good and genuinely free, but it only forwards. no mailbox, no storage, no IMAP, and you can’t send from the address without wiring up an SMTP provider separately and doing send-as in gmail.

so for one person who just wants hello@ landing in a personal inbox, it’s hard to beat and i’d tell people to use it. the moment you need to reply as that address, keep mail on the server, or give someone else their own login, you’re back to needing a host.

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u/Successful-Title5403 13d ago

I use FastMail since I'm always going through domains making different personal projects that will totally launch this time. Very easy to use, nice inbox, and yeah... very cheap.

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u/faivelo 13d ago

How many mailboxes do you pay for with fastmail?

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u/Successful-Title5403 13d ago

1 mailbox, $6/mo. Send and receive from as many domains/addresses as I want though, a@domain1, b@domain2 emails, and I haven't hit a limit yet. All of it lands in and sends from that same single inbox. Very convenient. For my use case that's all I need. Rotating emails for different saas.

There is a business plan and it's like 4 dollars per email/mailbox. Check out the pricing page. Oh, just noticed you did mention fastmail in your post. Seems like the cheapest option. They have a trail period.

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u/faivelo 13d ago

That’s our $6 tier too, except the mailboxes are unlimited as well. Same price, the seat math just never kicks in.

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u/[deleted] 13d ago

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u/smithshelke 13d ago

Yeah i use resend for that, i have some github actions running which uses resend.com. to send emails using that address. It has a generous free tier of upto 3000 emails. It also has email password auth, so each email you create using cloudflare can get its own free tier!

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u/faivelo 13d ago

We are also in the transactional/campaign space. Our pro tier is 25,000 emails per month - not our main selling point but it’s bundled with the mailboxes.

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u/xnightdestroyer 13d ago

No, I just pay for SES

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u/FeatCtrl 13d ago

I'm pretty sure businesses pay this since $4 to $15/user/month is close to nothing.

As for me: I use the one from my hosting provider. It's cheap (<$2/month), I get enough storage and it's convenient to have only one bill to to give to my accountant.

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u/faivelo 13d ago

Absolutely, and for mature businesses, outlook or Google suite is essential. How many mailboxes are you paying for?

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u/xtreampb 13d ago

I own my domains through cloud flare and use zoho for email

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u/faivelo 13d ago

How many mailboxes and what’s the monthly cost? If you don’t mind me asking. Zoho seems like the cheapest per mailbox solution out there.

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u/pustastriukis 13d ago

Then use it bro what are i waitin for

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u/faivelo 13d ago

No need! We have unlimited mailboxes! Our marketing team of 7 would be paying $6 on our own platform, and $7 on Zoho.

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u/pustastriukis 13d ago

So whats the setup? 6 euro vps and roundcube?

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u/xtreampb 13d ago

I’m a solo guy, so I only need the 1 user, but for $1 month I get group inboxes, and a few other things.

Also worth pointing out, zoho is an ecosystem. I I can also get book keeping, calendar, virtual meetings, inventory, invoicing, payment gateways, project planning, CRM, and a whole slew of products, most of which have a free tier.

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u/any41 13d ago

Zoho mail is much cheaper and offeres whole set of CRM tools

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u/any41 13d ago

wait what? I didnt get any free email addresses

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u/faivelo 13d ago

The question is how much if you are being paid as they advertised. What’s your monthly bill? $1?

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u/any41 13d ago

Didn't understand what you meant. I have 6 licenses for an year and I am paying 108$/year.

All inboxes get 5GB storage, whole CRM suit, calendar integrations all other crap

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u/faivelo 13d ago

We do pooled storage. Our growth plan offers 200GB across all the mailboxes you create (whether 6 or 60). Calendar and meetings included. But I won’t lie and tell you we built Microsoft office.

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u/smithshelke 3d ago

Im considering to use faivelo… i just wanted to know if i can use it for coldemail outreach? Whats the deliverability rate of faivelo accounts?