The domain is the cheap part. The real email domain price is three bills — registration, mailbox hosting, and the lines that bill separately.
A designer I know bought a domain for her studio on a Tuesday night. Twelve dollars and change, one click, done — and she spent the weekend putting the site up. Monday she went to send her first invoice from hello@ the new name and discovered that the thing she'd assumed came in the box didn't. Twelve dollars was the registration. The email domain price — the whole number, mailbox included — was still ahead of her.
I'd like to say I warned her. I didn't. I assumed she already knew, which is the same assumption the registrar makes, except they get paid for it.
The domain gets you the name. The mailbox is a different product, from a different company, with a different renewal date. Nobody mentions that at checkout, because the checkout page belongs to the registrar, who would quite like to sell you email as an upsell.
So: what's the real email domain price per year, all in, once you stop looking at one provider's headline figure?
Three bills. Let's price each.
When someone searches for an email domain price they're usually holding one number in their head. That number is almost always the mailbox host's monthly rate, which is maybe half the story.
The three components:
Miss any one and your budget is wrong. Most people miss the third.
Retail .com pricing sits around $10 to $20 a year as of September 2026, and the spread between registrars is mostly margin rather than service. A few sell at wholesale cost — Cloudflare's registrar built its whole pitch on that — while others price the first year at a few dollars and make it back on renewal.
Which brings up the trap. The first-year price and the renewal price are frequently not the same number, and the renewal is the one you'll pay eleven more times. A $1.99 first year that renews at $19.99 is a $19.99 domain wearing a costume. Find the renewal rate before you buy — it's on their page, just further down.
I have domains on auto-renew that I'd swear cost nine dollars, and I haven't checked in two years. Take the advice accordingly.
Two more line items: WHOIS privacy is free at most decent registrars and still billed at a few, and non-.com extensions swing wildly — plenty renew at multiples of .com.
Call it $15 a year as a planning figure and check the actual renewal before you commit.
One thing I'd skip: whatever email product the registrar offers at checkout. Often forwarding dressed up as hosting, and rarely the cheapest real mailbox you can buy.
This is the component with the biggest spread, because providers use two different pricing models and the gap grows with your headcount.
Per user, per month. You pay for each human with an address. List prices as of September 2026: Google Workspace Business Starter and Microsoft 365 Business Basic are both $7.00 per user per month — $84 per person per year. Zoho Mail's entry tier is $1. Fastmail is $5.
Two footnotes. Google is running a 30% promotion that ends 23 December 2026, so checkout currently shows $4.90 — budget against the $84, because the promo has an expiry date and the list price doesn't. Microsoft raised Business Basic from $6.00 to $7.00 on 1 July 2026, and existing customers keep the old rate until renewal — so a colleague may still be paying $6 and be certain you're wrong.
Flat fee, per year. One price, no headcount multiplier. JustEmails is $49 a year for unlimited domains and unlimited mailboxes with a unified inbox across all of them. Everyone else in this model ladders, so the rung decides the comparison, not the brand. Published list prices as of September 2026 — re-read theirs before you budget: MXroute's Small tier is $59 a year, the ladder running $59 / $69 / $79 with only storage changing between rungs. Migadu ladders on two axes at once — Micro $19, Mini $90, Standard $290, Maxi $990, all USD, the daily send ceiling climbing at every step.
Which is where most Migadu-versus-us comparisons go wrong, and it irritates me every time. The rung with a daily ceiling comparable to ours is Standard, not Micro. Quoting $19 against $49 sets a tier capped at twenty sends a day beside one that ramps well past it, then calls the gap a price difference.
Here's the comparison we publish on our own homepage, unedited:
| Provider | Price | Domains | Storage | Unified Inbox | Email API |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| JustEmails | $49/year flat | Unlimited | 10 GB | Yes | 1K/mo free |
| Google Workspace | $7/user/mo | Per-user | 30 GB/user | No | No |
| Microsoft 365 | $7/user/mo | Per-user | 50 GB/user | No | No |
| Zoho Mail | $1/user/mo | Per subscription | 5 GB/user | No | No |
| Fastmail | $5/user/mo | Limited | 50 GB/user | Partial | No |
| MXroute | $59/yr Small | Unlimited | 10 GB | cPanel | No |
At one person on one domain, honestly, these all land close enough that price shouldn't decide it. The models only diverge once you add people or domains — which is the argument laid out at length in our breakdown of flat-fee versus per-mailbox pricing.
The bit that ruins budgets.
Extra people with their own logins. On per-user hosts this is the whole pricing model — every person is another $84 a year. On JustEmails a mailbox costs nothing and creating one never touches billing, but an additional team member — a second human with their own dashboard access — is $2 per member per month, owner free. One person running forty mailboxes pays $49 flat; four people who each need admin access pay $49 plus $96.
That distinction between a mailbox and a seat is the single most common reason someone budgets one number and gets invoiced another, and I find it genuinely irritating that the industry uses the two words interchangeably.
Storage. Per-user hosts give a generous-sounding allowance per head — 30 GB at Google, 50 GB at Microsoft — which twelve people will mostly never touch. Flat-fee hosts pool it instead. JustEmails includes a 10 GB account-wide pool, with additional 100 GB blocks at $99 a year. If your team archives attachments rather than deleting them, that second line is a when, not an if.
Outbound volume. Every host has a ceiling and none of them advertise it next to the price. Ours took me three passes to write down accurately, which I don't love admitting in a post about clarity. Two clocks run, not one. A brand-new account sends 20 a day through its first week. Each domain ramps separately from the day you verify it — 50 a day through day 7, 200 a day through day 14, 500 a day from day 15 — and that second clock starts over for every domain you add, including on an account you've held for years. API sends draw on the same daily allowance, not a separate one.
Which means the honest planning number for week one is the ramp, not the ceiling. MXroute is 400 an hour on every tier. Migadu Micro is 20 a day.
None of these are newsletter tools. A mailing list means budgeting a dedicated sending platform on top of your mailbox host.
Transactional API volume, if you need it. We include 1,000 emails a month, with extra tiers at $25 a year per 10,000. Those raise the monthly quota only — the daily ceiling still applies on top, putting the practical monthly maximum around 15,000. Nine tiers doesn't buy 91,000 sends. It buys 91,000 of allowance behind a 15,000 door, and I'd rather you read that here than find it in production. One more thing to know before you sign up to test it: the API isn't available during the trial at all. Paid plans only.
There's a whole tier of "free custom domain email" that works right up until it doesn't.
Forwarding services. Cloudflare Email Routing and friends accept mail at your domain and relay it to an inbox you already have. Free, reliable, genuinely good at the one job. But forwarding is not a mailbox — no storage you control, no outbound path unless you wire up SMTP separately. Reply to a client and it lands from your personal Gmail. Where exactly that line sits: forwarding services versus real mailboxes.
Bundled cPanel email on shared hosting. Technically a mailbox, often with dire deliverability, because the sending IP is shared with every other tenant on the box.
For a side project, forwarding is the right call and I'd tell you to save the $49. For anything that sends invoices, it isn't.
Generic comparisons assume everyone is a ten-person team on one domain, which is why the email domain price they quote never matches yours. Four shapes instead, registration included at $15:
Solo operator, one domain, three aliases. Google: $15 + $84 = $99 a year. JustEmails: $15 + $49 = $64. Real but small. Decide on features.
Five-person team, one domain, one admin. Google: $15 + (5 × $84) = $435. JustEmails: five mailboxes cost nothing extra and one dashboard login is the free owner seat, so $64. If all five need admin logins, add 4 × $24 for $160.
Twelve-person agency, forty client domains. Domains alone are 40 × $15 = $600, now the dominant line. Google adds 12 × $84 = $1,008 for $1,608. JustEmails adds $49 plus $24 a year for each extra admin beyond the free owner — three admins lands the whole thing at $697, of which the mail bill is $97. Fourteen percent.
Same agency, heavy archives. Add one 100 GB storage block: $796.
Notice what happened in the third shape. Past a handful of domains, registration becomes the biggest number on the invoice and the mailbox host stops being where the money is — the opposite of how everyone shops for it.
Four questions, in order.
Are you buying a mailbox or a productivity suite? If Drive, Meet or Teams are load-bearing, Workspace isn't overpriced email. It's correctly priced software where email is the free part, and you should stay.
How many domains, in eighteen months? One domain forever: per-user is fine, genuinely, and you can ignore every flat-fee pitch including this one. Two or more, though — or any real chance of adding them — and pricing that doesn't charge per domain changes the arithmetic permanently, in a direction that doesn't reverse.
How many people need to log in, versus how many need an address? Different counts on a flat-fee host, the same count on a per-user one. Get both before you compare.
What's the renewal price, on both bills? The discount you signed up on is not the price.
And check what a migration costs before you're mid-migration — the full switching-cost arithmetic is elsewhere. The tooling is free; the overlap month and the DNS risk aren't.
Same failure mode as every infrastructure line item: the sticker price is the small number, the operational cost is the one nobody models. Our sibling team made the case against a five-tool observability stack on identical logic, and ad budgets have it worse, per the real cost of click fraud.
When you do commit, setup is a handful of DNS records and mostly waiting on propagation. Our custom domain email setup walkthrough is realistic about how long that takes.
The email domain price is two separate renewals, so budget both. The domain name itself typically runs somewhere around $10 to $20 a year for a .com at retail in September 2026, depending on the registrar. The mailbox on top of it is either per-user — $7.00 per user per month list at Google Workspace Business Starter and Microsoft 365 Business Basic, $1 at Zoho Mail, $5 at Fastmail — or a flat annual fee, like JustEmails at $49 a year for unlimited mailboxes across unlimited domains, or MXroute's Small tier at $59. So one person on one domain lands roughly between $25 and $105 a year all in.
Almost never, and this catches people constantly. Registration buys you the name and the right to point its DNS wherever you like. Sending and receiving mail at that name needs a mail host, which is a separate product on a separate renewal date. Some registrars bundle forwarding — inbound mail gets relayed to a Gmail address — but forwarding isn't a mailbox and you can't reply from the address without more setup. If your registrar's checkout offered email as an add-on, read what it actually does before buying it.
For a personal side project, sure. For anything that sends invoices, no. Free routes are mostly forwarding services, like Cloudflare Email Routing, which delivers inbound mail to another inbox and stops there. You get no storage you control, no real outbound path from the address, and replies come from wherever you forwarded to unless you wire up SMTP separately. The cost isn't money, it's that the first client who replies to a thread sees a different address than the one you printed on the invoice.
Four. Renewal pricing — first-year domain promos expire and the renewal is often two to three times the intro rate. Storage — included allowances sound large per user and are tight in a shared pool; on JustEmails it's a 10 GB account-wide pool with extra 100 GB blocks at $99 a year. Extra logins — a second person with their own dashboard access is $2 per member per month, owner free. And sending ceilings, which are the ones people discover in production rather than in a pricing table.
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.
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