Business Email Cost Per Domain in 2026: $2 to $84 a Year

A business email costs about $5 to $7 per user per month for one domain on the mainstream hosts (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Fastmail). Once you own several domains and want a real mailbox on each, the business email cost per domain ranges from $2 to $84 a year, depending mostly on whether the provider bills per seat or per account.

Pricing pages only quote the per-user number, so I did the division myself for the setup I actually have: a few domains, each with a working hello@ that receives mail and replies as itself. Below is what one mailbox per domain costs across eight providers, the two flat-rate hosts that beat everyone on raw price, and the costs that never show up on a pricing page.

How much does a business email cost?

For a single domain the per-user price is the whole answer. Google Workspace Business Starter and Microsoft 365 Business Basic are both $7 per user per month on annual billing, Fastmail Standard is $5, and Zoho Mail Lite is around $1. One person with one address pays about $12 to $84 a year, and most small businesses end up at $84 because they want Google or Microsoft anyway.

That answer changes when you buy a second domain. A per-user price assumes one identity on one domain, so every extra domain that needs its own mailbox is another seat at full price. Five domains on Google Workspace is five seats, $35 a month, for one person.

Google does let you attach extra domains to one seat as aliases, and when that's free is covered in my Google Workspace multiple domains pricing breakdown, so I won't repeat the seat math here.

How to work out business email cost per domain

Providers price per seat, and a seat is one identity on one domain. To turn that into a cost per domain you need a scenario, so here is the one I used throughout: one person, five domains, one real mailbox on each. No team, no shared seats, just five addresses that can receive mail and answer it as themselves.

That's the setup most people searching for this have. A main product, a side project, a client brand, and two domains bought for ideas that might happen one day. Four of the five get almost no mail, which is why paying full seat price for each one hurts.

Aliases don't count here, since an alias is another address on the same identity, not a separate mailbox. If free aliases solve your problem, your cost per domain is close to zero and you can stop reading.

The 2026 cost per domain table

Prices verified against vendor pricing pages on 20 October 2026. Figures use annual billing wherever the provider offers it, since that's the cheaper option everywhere.

A few notes so the numbers stay honest. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 are suite bills more than email bills: that $84 per domain also buys Drive, Docs and Meet, or the Office equivalents. Google's page currently shows an intro discount for new customers, and I used the regular $7 you pay after it ends. Fastmail now prices in US dollars, and Standard is $5 per user paid yearly or $6 month to month.

Zoho is the one row I couldn't pin down in dollars. Zoho's page showed €0.90 per user per month (billed annually) in my browser check, and the US price isn't rendered to me, so treat ~$1 as approximate and confirm it on Zoho's page.

The spread is the interesting part. The same job costs $2 or $84 per domain per year, and what decides it is whether the provider prices per seat or per account.

The cheapest business email if you own several domains

If you own several domains and care mostly about price, two names in that table play a different game.

Migadu charges per account, not per mailbox. One flat fee covers unlimited mailboxes and domains. Mini is $90 a year with 30 GB of storage and allows 1,000 incoming and 100 outgoing messages a day. Micro is $19 a year, with 5 GB and only 200 incoming and 20 outgoing a day. Those limits are account-wide, shared by every domain. For a handful of quiet project domains that's plenty. With real daily mail volume, check the outgoing number first.

Purelymail is the cheapest thing in the table by a wide margin. The Simple plan is $10 a year with no hard limits on users, custom domains or storage (there are soft limits). It's a small, no-frills operation and the interface shows it, but the multi-domain math is hard to argue with.

Both are good answers to "cheapest email for multiple domains", and I'd rather say so than pretend otherwise. If all you need is a mailbox per domain at the lowest number, go with one of them. What you get is IMAP accounts, one per address, and a mail client pointed at them, with no single view tagged by domain, and they aren't built for your app's transactional email (Migadu's daily outgoing caps make that plain). If the client is the part left to sort out, I compared the options in best email client for multiple accounts.

The costs that never show up on a pricing page

Three real costs are missing from every row above, including mine.

The reply problem. The cheap route most people take in practice is free forwarding into a personal Gmail, which works out at $0 per domain. That holds until you hit reply and the answer leaves from your personal address instead of the domain the mail arrived on. Since 2024 the big mailbox providers filter or bounce mail that fails SPF, DKIM and DMARC for the domain in the From line, so Gmail's Send-As patch isn't a reliable fix anymore. A $0 setup whose replies land in spam ends up costing more than any row in the table. The full explanation is in how to reply to email from a custom domain.

Transactional sending. If any of those domains send receipts, password resets or notifications, none of the mailbox hosts above are built for it. You add Resend, Postmark or Mailgun on top, which means a second bill and a second DNS setup per domain. Price the pair, not the mailbox alone.

Setup and maintenance time. Every domain needs its DNS records added and verified, and every provider is one more login. Five domains across two vendors is ten setups and two dashboards. That time never shows up as a line item, and it's why a lot of people drift back to forwarding. I walked through the routes in email hosting for multiple domains, and if you're on forwarding now, here's where free forwarding stops.

Where Mailyond fits

I built Mailyond for the case where your domains also send. Every connected domain's mail lands in one inbox, tagged by domain, and the same domains send your app's email through a Resend-compatible API. The receipt your app sends and the customer's reply to it end up in the same place, on one bill. It's a flat $10, $20 or $40 a month.

Per domain, that's $24 a year on Basic ($10 a month for up to 5 domains) or Pro ($20 a month for up to 10), and $16 a year on Agency ($40 a month for up to 30). No per-inbox or per-mailbox fees: every address on every domain lands in one inbox. Basic includes 5,000 emails a month, counted as sent plus received, so inbound mail uses the allowance too. Past that it's $1.80 per extra 1,000 if you switch overage on.

Each domain is one 5-minute DNS setup with three records: a DKIM TXT record, a Return-Path CNAME and an MX record. Once they verify, the domain receives mail, replies go out as the address the mail came to, and your app sends from it with the same key. If your app already calls Resend, you keep that code and swap the base URL and the key.

That makes it the fourth cheapest paid row, behind Purelymail, Zoho and Migadu. If you only want the lowest cost per mailbox and don't mind managing the mailboxes yourself, take Purelymail or Migadu. If your domains send app email and get replies, the fair comparison is the $24 against a mailbox host plus a transactional provider. Plans are on the pricing page, and you can get started for free with a 7-day trial.

The short version

Business email in 2026 costs about $2 to $84 per domain per year for the same job, and per-seat versus per-account billing is what moves it that much. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 land at $84 per domain because you're buying a suite seat to get a mailbox. Fastmail is $60 and Zoho around $12. Flat-rate hosts like Migadu and Purelymail land between $2 and $18, with sending limits to check.

Then add what the table leaves out: replies that pass DMARC, transactional sending, and the setup time per domain. Price all three together and the cheap rows get a lot closer to the expensive ones. If your domains need both halves, start a 7-day Mailyond trial and run the numbers on your own setup.

FAQ

How much does a business email cost per month?

About $5 to $7 per user per month on Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 or Fastmail with annual billing, and around $1 on Zoho Mail Lite. On all of them, every extra domain that needs its own mailbox is another user.

Is there a free business email with a custom domain?

Cloudflare Email Routing is free, but it's receive only: it forwards mail on to another inbox and has no mailbox of its own. Zoho Mail also has a free plan for up to 5 users on one domain, without IMAP or POP access, and only in select data centers.

What is the cheapest business email for multiple domains?

Purelymail, at $10 a year flat, which is about $2 per domain across five. Migadu Mini is next at $90 a year, or $18 per domain, with daily sending limits worth checking. Neither is built for your app's transactional email.

Does Google Workspace charge per domain or per user?

Per user. Adding an extra domain to an existing account doesn't cost anything by itself, but each separate mailbox on it is another user at $7 a month on Business Starter.

Do I need a separate mailbox for each domain, or is an alias enough?

An alias is enough if the domains can share one identity and one inbox. Use separate mailboxes when you want the domains kept apart, for example different brands, different people answering, or replies that must go out as the exact address the mail came to.

What does business email cost once you add replies and app sending?

Price the pair: a mailbox host for reading and replying, plus a transactional provider like Resend, Postmark or Mailgun for the app's email, each with its own bill and DNS setup per domain. Mailyond covers both on one plan, $10 a month for up to 5 domains with 5,000 emails sent plus received.