A price-by-price read on cheap email hosting — what $0, $19, $49 and $84 a year each cost you in mailboxes, send ceilings and storage, including where our own plan stops.
Search for cheap email hosting, or the cheapest way to use your own domain, and you land in a thread where one person pays less for a whole year of mail than the next commenter pays monthly for the VPS they self-host on, and a third is quietly asking why their mail stopped arriving on Tuesday. All three answers are real. They're priced for different problems. The thread almost never says which problem is yours.
So here's the ladder, priced as of September 2026, with the trade-off spelled out at each rung instead of buried in a footnote.
We build JustEmails at Velocity Digital Labs, which means we're on this ladder too — at $49/year. We'll tell you where we stop, including the three or four cases where the honest recommendation is somebody else. Writing those paragraphs is annoying. Leaving them out would be worse.
It bundles four things that get priced independently everywhere else:
Receiving. An MX record points at a server that accepts mail for your domain. Cheap. Almost free, actually — this is the part forwarders give away.
Storage. Where the mail sits. Measured either per mailbox or as one pooled account allowance, and the difference matters more than the number.
Sending. The expensive part, and the one every cheap host rate-limits. Outbound reputation costs real money to maintain, so a host charging you pocket change a year is not handing you unmetered outbound. Nobody is. Anyone implying otherwise has either buried the limit in a support doc or hasn't yet been on the wrong side of a blocklist.
Somebody minding the plumbing. DKIM keys rotating, blocklists watched, TLS kept current, records checked after you change registrars. Invisible until it breaks, which is why it's the first thing cut at the bottom of the market.
Price cheap email hosting on the first two and you'll pick wrong. The third and fourth are where the differences live.
| Tier | Price | Domains | Storage | Real mailbox? | Outbound |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Forwarding (Cloudflare and similar) | Free | Unlimited | None | No | No |
| Budget flat-rate (Migadu Micro, Purelymail) | Micro $19/yr; Purelymail lower — read their page | Varies | 5 GB or so | Yes | Tight — Micro is 20/day |
| JustEmails | $49/yr flat | Unlimited | 10 GB | Yes | Per account: 50/day, then 200/day, then 500/day as a domain warms up — and a brand-new account sits at 20/day for its own first week. API sends share the number |
| MXroute Small | $59/yr | Unlimited | 10 GB | Yes | 400/hour |
| Zoho Mail | $1/user/mo | Per subscription | 5 GB/user | Yes | Per their limits |
| Fastmail | $5/user/mo | Limited | 50 GB/user | Yes | Per their limits |
| Google Workspace / Microsoft 365 | $7/user/mo | Per user | 30-50 GB/user | Yes | Per their limits |
Every figure there is as each vendor published it in September 2026 — and vendors move prices without telling bloggers, so check their pages before you budget. Two cells already moved this year: Microsoft 365 Business Basic went $6.00 → $7.00 per user per month on 1 July 2026, and Google's 30% promotion, running until 23 December 2026, shows $4.90 against the $7.00 list price.
What you get: mail addressed to hello@yourdomain.com arrives in a Gmail or Outlook inbox you already have. Setup is a few DNS records and a few minutes.
What you give up: the mailbox. No storage on your side, no IMAP, no folders that belong to your domain, and no outbound path — replying means sending from your personal address or wiring a separate SMTP provider behind Gmail's "Send mail as". You also give up portability. The mail lives in an account that isn't organised around your domain, so when you hire someone and need to hand over the inbox, there's nothing to hand over.
Forwarding is the right answer for one low-traffic address. It stops being the right answer the moment two people need the same inbox, or you get a bounce you can't debug — the whole boundary is in forwarding services versus real mailboxes.
Free is a fine price for something you only ever read.
This band is where the smallest budget hosts live. Migadu's entry rung, Micro, is $19/year. Purelymail undercuts even that, though we'd point you at their own page for the current number rather than quote one here — a stale price in a comparison post is worse than no price. Both are cheaper than us. We're not going to pretend otherwise.
What you give up is throughput and surface area. Migadu Micro carries 5 GB and 20 outbound messages a day — that's the tier, and any comparison that omits it is off by an order of magnitude, because Migadu's rung whose 500/day matches ours is Standard at $290/year. Purelymail we treat as volatile: we haven't independently re-verified their current figures.
The trade here isn't quality — plenty of people run these happily for years. It's that a 20/day ceiling can't send your app's password resets. If that isn't your problem, save the money. Genuinely. Go.
Our rung. JustEmails is $49 a year, flat, for unlimited custom domains and unlimited mailboxes with a unified inbox across all of them — additional team members are $2 per member per month, and storage beyond the included 10 GB is $99 a year per 100 GB. One plan, annual billing only — there's no monthly option and no tier above or below it. That also covers aliases, full IMAP/SMTP/POP3, and replies going out from whichever address the mail arrived at. MXroute's Small tier is $59/year in the same shape, with 400 outbound messages an hour on every rung of their ladder.
What JustEmails adds on top of the mailbox: auto-configured SPF, DKIM, DMARC and MTA-STS, plus continuous domain-health monitoring that emails you when one of those records drifts after verification. That last one is the feature nobody shops for and everybody eventually needs — records get clobbered when a marketing tool rewrites SPF, or a domain moves registrar and the TXT records don't come along. Also in the box: DANE/TLSA per domain, BIMI with VMC, DKIM key rotation that keeps the previous key live so mail in flight still verifies, blocklist monitoring across five DNSBLs, RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe with a suppression list enforced at send time, and 1,000 transactional API emails a month.
Now the part most comparison posts skip.
What we give up at $49. No calendar. No contacts. No native mobile apps — you use a standard IMAP client. No SSO or SAML. Storage is 10 GB, and going past it is $99/year per additional 100 GB, which is a real line item if you're archiving attachments. Additional team members — meaning extra people with their own dashboard login, not extra mailboxes — are $2 per member per month, with zero included; the owner is free. And all mail leaves from shared infrastructure. Dedicated IPs aren't offered, so if your compliance checklist has that box on it, buy elsewhere.
And the ceiling, stated plainly, because this is the thing that makes a working setup look broken. A freshly verified domain is capped at 50 sends a day for its first week, 200 a day in the second week, and 500 a day from day 15. Separately, a brand-new account is held to 20 a day for its own first seven days. Both apply and the lower one wins — so somebody signing up tonight and publishing DNS at 11pm has 20 sends, not 500. Three details that catch people:
The part that actually stings: a tutorial written against an established account never meets the first week's ceiling, so it won't warn you about it. That's why this section is longer than the pricing section.
Which also settles one thing: this isn't a newsletter backend. The SMTP details connect to Listmonk or Mautic perfectly and then hit the wall. If bulk is the job, use a bulk ESP.
Zoho Mail's cheapest paid tier is $1/user/month with 5 GB each, and they still run a free tier for a few users on one domain. Fastmail is $5/user/month with 50 GB. Google Workspace Business Starter and Microsoft 365 Business Basic both list at $7.00/user/month — $84 per person per year.
Going up this ladder costs you the flat bill. Refusing to climb it costs you the suite: documents, shared calendars, video calls, device management, the identity layer your accountant's software already expects. That's most of what the $84 buys. It isn't an email premium, it's a bundle you may genuinely want.
The contrarian bit: if you're one person on one domain and you already want Docs and Drive, buy Workspace — it bundles an office suite we don't. Saving $35 a year isn't worth an afternoon of DNS. Flat-rate hosting earns its keep at the second domain, the second person, or the first API key — and an agency holding fifty client domains isn't in this conversation at all. We ran that arithmetic in flat-fee versus per-mailbox pricing.
Mailcow or iRedMail on a VPS: software free, server whatever your provider charges, and your evenings. The evenings are the expensive part. You own everything — including the blocklist appeal when your VPS provider's IP range picks up a bad neighbour, and the 3am cert renewal. We costed the real number, hours included, in the self-hosted comparison. Reasonable if the learning is the point. Bad if email is infrastructure you'd rather not think about — which is most of what cheap email hosting is for.
Four questions, in order of how often they change the answer:
Notice that none of those four is "which has the nicer interface". You'll spend very little time in a host's dashboard once it's set up, and you will look at a bounce message at the worst possible moment.
Then price the move itself — DNS TTLs, dual-delivery windows, the mail you can't afford to lose. That's in what switching email providers really costs.
Forwarding is the cheapest, and it's often free — but it gives you no mailbox and no outbound sending on its own. The cheapest paid mailbox sits in the $10-20/year band from small budget hosts, often with a tight daily send ceiling and a few gigabytes of storage. Flat-rate hosting for unlimited domains starts around $49/year, which is where JustEmails sits, and MXroute's Small tier is $59/year as of September 2026. Per-user hosting starts near $1/user/month on Zoho's cheapest paid tier.
You can receive it for free. Cloudflare Email Routing and similar forwarders take mail addressed to your domain and drop it into an inbox you already own, at no cost. What you don't get is a mailbox that stores your mail, IMAP access, or the ability to send as your domain without wiring up a separate SMTP provider. Free forwarding is a good answer for one address you rarely reply from, and a bad one for a business inbox.
Because most of the Workspace bill isn't email. Google Workspace Business Starter lists at $7.00/user/month and Microsoft 365 Business Basic at $7.00/user/month as of September 2026, and both bundle documents, storage, video calls and identity management. A mail-only host sells one product, prices per account instead of per person, and skips the suite entirely. You're not getting a discount on the same thing — you're buying less.
Four things, in this order: the daily send ceiling and how it ramps for a newly verified domain, whether storage is pooled or per mailbox, whether IMAP and SMTP are included or gated behind a higher tier, and what the migration path looks like for your existing mail. The send ceiling is the one that surprises people — every host rate-limits new domains, and a tutorial written against a mature account will fail on day one.
One hostname does everything: mail.justemails.app, IMAP on 993, SMTP submission on 587 with STARTTLS. Not 465, and there are no app-specific passwords to generate — IMAP and SMTP authenticate with the mailbox password itself.
The trial is 7 days and needs a card up front; you're not charged until it ends. It gives you one domain, two mailboxes and 1 GB — enough to prove mail flows, not enough to build an integration against, because transactional API access is on the paid plan only. We'd rather put that in writing than let you find out on day three. Refunds run 14 days from the first charge.
Unlimited custom domain email hosting for $49/year flat — unlimited domains, unlimited mailboxes, 10 GB storage, full IMAP/SMTP. Built for agencies, freelancers, and anyone managing email across more than one domain.