$1,680 a year for 20 mailboxes. Or $49.

Google Workspace Business Starter · $7 per user per month, annual billing, USD · 20 mailboxes · checked 9 September 2026

Every address you add is another $84 a year. JustEmails is $49 a year total — unlimited mailboxes, unlimited domains, one inbox.

Google Workspace pricing: $7 per user per month, annual billing, USD. Checked against their published pricing on 9 September 2026. If it has changed since, the comparison above is out of date and we'd rather you told us than took our word for it. List price. Google is running 30% off until 23 December 2026, so new customers may see $4.90/user/month for the first year.

What $49 a year buys

Free migration from Google Workspace over IMAP — folders and read state intact. DNS records written and verified for you, per domain. Keep Google Workspace running while you test it.

Feature by feature

Who should pick what

Deliverability: where Google genuinely has an edge, and where it does not

Google operates one of the most trusted outbound IP reputations on the internet, and at very high volume that is a real advantage nobody else can simply match. If you send six figures of mail a month directly from user inboxes, expect a small but measurable lift from Workspace that we cannot claim to replicate.

Below that — which is where almost every small business and agency actually lives — the gap closes to nothing measurable, because inbox placement at normal volume is dominated by authentication and sender behaviour rather than by whose IP block you sit in. SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured correctly, consistent volume, low complaint rates: those decide it.

The failure that actually costs people inbox placement is more mundane than reputation. A nameserver change at the registrar, a DKIM record dropped during an unrelated edit, an expired DNSSEC signature — mail keeps sending, authentication silently starts failing, and the first anyone hears of it is a customer saying they never got the reply.

JustEmails re-checks MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC and MTA-STS on every verified domain every six hours and emails you, plus fires a webhook if you want one, the first time a record stops resolving. Workspace will not tell you that a domain you own has drifted. For a portfolio of domains, that difference matters more day to day than the IP reputation gap does.

What the per-seat model actually costs a portfolio

Workspace prices per person and the per-user figure does not fall as you grow — a 26th mailbox costs the same as the 25th. That is fine when every seat is a human being using a suite. It stops making sense when most of your mailboxes are functions rather than people.

At small-business scale, a large share of mailboxes are role accounts: info@, sales@, support@, billing@, careers@. They have no Drive footprint and never join a Meet call, but they bill at the full per-seat rate. We have watched founders postpone creating careers@ because it meant another monthly line item for an address that receives six messages a week.

JustEmails is $49 a year for the account, regardless of how many mailboxes or domains you attach. Hiring someone does not change the email bill, and neither does taking on three more client domains. That is the entire pitch, and whether it beats Workspace for you is arithmetic you can do in about a minute with the calculator above.

What you keep and what you actually give up

You keep the things that make email work: custom-domain mailboxes, IMAP and SMTP, aliases and catch-all, SPF, DKIM and DMARC, webmail, and a migration path in and out.

You give up Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Meet, Calendar’s deeper cross-organisation features, Gemini in the inbox, and the native mobile apps. JustEmails replaces the email layer. It does not replace a productivity suite, and any page telling you otherwise is wasting your time.

The arrangement most teams land on is a split rather than a switch: keep Workspace seats for the handful of people who genuinely live in Drive, and move the role mailboxes to a flat fee. That is how we run our own company, and it is usually the honest answer rather than a compromise.

Running a portfolio rather than a company

Workspace's admin console is built around people: you provision a user, assign a licence, grant access. That is the right shape for one company with one domain and a headcount, and it is the wrong shape for someone holding twelve domains where each needs two or three addresses that belong to a function.

Secondary domains are supported, so this is not a capability argument. It is an operational one. Every domain still needs MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC published correctly, and Workspace will not tell you when one of them stops resolving — mail simply starts failing authentication while continuing to send, which is the failure mode nobody notices from inside their own inbox.

JustEmails generates those four records per domain, verifies them, and re-checks every verified domain every six hours. When a record drifts you get an email and, if you want one, a webhook naming the domain. Across three domains that is a convenience; across thirty it is the only way the problem surfaces before a customer reports it.

The second difference is the inbox itself. Workspace gives you an account per mailbox and you switch between them. We give one inbox spanning every domain, with per-row colour tagging by domain, so a portfolio reads as one queue rather than twelve tabs.

Common questions

Move one domain and see

7 days free. Keep Google Workspace running while you try it — nothing has to move until you're convinced.

Or read the full pricing breakdown.