$240 a year for 20 mailboxes. Or $49.

Zoho Mail Mail Lite · $1 per user per month, billed annually (Zoho sells yearly subscriptions only), USD · 20 mailboxes · checked 9 September 2026

Every address you add is another $12 a year. JustEmails is $49 a year total — unlimited mailboxes, unlimited domains, one inbox.

Zoho Mail pricing: $1 per user per month, billed annually (Zoho sells yearly subscriptions only), 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 If it has changed since, the comparison above is out of date and we'd rather you told us than took our word for it.

What $49 a year buys

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

Feature by feature

Who should pick what

Deliverability: authentication is a tie, monitoring is not

Zoho and JustEmails both publish SPF, DKIM and DMARC properly, so on the checks a receiving server runs first there is nothing between them. Anyone claiming a large deliverability gap between two correctly configured hosts is making a sales argument.

Inbox placement at normal volume is decided by sender behaviour: steady volume rather than spikes, recipients who open and reply, complaint rates near zero, and DNS that still resolves on the day you send.

The failure that actually costs people placement is administrative. A nameserver change at the registrar, a DKIM record dropped during an unrelated edit, an expired signature — mail keeps flowing, authentication quietly starts failing, and nobody notices until a customer says your reply never arrived.

We re-check MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC and MTA-STS on every verified domain every six hours and email you, plus fire a webhook if you want one, the first time a record breaks. Zoho does not offer equivalent monitoring. Across a portfolio of domains that is the difference that shows up in practice.

The number that decides this is mailboxes per person, not headcount

Almost every comparison of per-user pricing assumes each person has exactly one mailbox. That assumption is what makes per-seat pricing look cheap: at $12 per user per year, one-to-one is the scenario the model is built for.

The assumption is the problem. Most businesses run a good deal more mailboxes than people: support@, sales@, billing@, info@, hello@, careers@, press@, plus one per brand or client domain. Zoho bills every one of those as a seat. On our plan they are not a billable unit at all, so the bill is the same whether you run five or fifty.

So the honest way to run the comparison is to count mailboxes, not staff, and to include the part of our pricing that does scale: extra dashboard members are $2 each per month, with the owner free. A solo founder with ten role mailboxes pays us $49 against Zoho’s $132. Five people who each need dashboard access, with five mailboxes between them, is closer to a tie. The crossover moves with your ratio, and the calculator above uses your numbers rather than a scenario we picked.

Where Zoho genuinely wins

The free tier is real and unusually generous — a small number of users on a single custom domain with webmail access, at no cost. For a side project or a one-person business that has not started hiring, that is difficult to argue against and we do not try to.

The wider suite is the other genuine advantage. Zoho sells CRM, Projects, Books, Docs and a great deal more, all under one account with one login. If you already run any of it, keeping email in the same place has a real administrative value that a standalone product cannot offer. Their mobile apps are also more polished than our mobile web, and they have been doing this a lot longer than we have.

Our case is narrower and worth stating plainly: we are email only. If a full office suite is what you are shopping for, that is a different purchase and this page is not it.

When mailboxes outnumber people

Per-user pricing assumes mailboxes and people correspond. In a small business they frequently do not: info@, sales@, support@, billing@, careers@ and a couple of per-client addresses belong to functions, not employees, and on a per-seat plan each one is a full-price seat.

That is the case Zoho's model handles least well and ours handles best. A one-person business with fifteen role addresses pays fifteen seats there and one flat $49 here. Below about five mailboxes the arithmetic runs the other way, which is why the calculator above takes a mailbox count rather than asserting a winner.

The storage shape differs too. Mail Lite caps each mailbox at 5 GB, so a busy address hits its ceiling while quiet ones sit mostly empty and nothing can be moved between them. Our 10 GB covers the whole account, so there is no per-mailbox administration and no address stopping unexpectedly.

And every domain you add is included rather than configured and billed. DNS records are generated and verified per domain, then re-checked every six hours with alerts on drift — which matters more as the number of domains grows than any per-mailbox feature does.

Common questions

Move one domain and see

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

Or read the full pricing breakdown.