Email Hosting Cost in 2026: What a Business Mailbox Really Costs Per User

Short answer. Hosting a business mailbox on your own domain costs about $1 to $22 per user per month for a normal single mailbox, and the two names most people start with sit at the same point on that ladder: Google Workspace Business Starter and Microsoft 365 Business Basic are both $7 per user per month on an annual plan and $8.40 on monthly billing, to the cent. Below them, Zoho Mail Lite is $1, Namecheap works out at roughly $0.79 to $1.24 a mailbox, and IONOS advertises $1.10 on a three-year term. A self-hosted server is not the cheap option it looks like: the free software's own minimum spec puts it on a $48 a month box, more than Google charges for six users. Buy the cheap tier if you need a mailbox and nothing else, buy Google or Microsoft when the suite is the point, and if the mailboxes are for cold outreach, that is a different cost problem.

Every figure below was read on the vendor's own pricing page on 25 September 2026, in US dollars, before tax. Zoho and IONOS say on the page that tax is added and Proton says taxes may apply; treat the others as pre-tax list prices too. Prices change, so check the page before you buy.

The price ladder, per mailbox per month

Annual price first, monthly price where the vendor sells one, then the quota.

• Zoho Mail Lite: $1, annual only. 5 GB per user ($1.25 for 10 GB). Custom domain included.
• Namecheap Private Email: about $0.79 to $1.24. Launch renews at $14.88 a year for one 5 GB mailbox ($1.24 a month); Expand is three 10 GB mailboxes for $41.88 a year ($1.16 each); Scale is five 15 GB mailboxes for $71.88 ($1.20 each). Extra mailboxes are priced separately, see below.
• IONOS Mail Basic 1: $1.10 with a 3-year term, then $2; the struck regular price on the page is $4. 2 GB per account.
• Zoho Workplace Standard: $2 annual, $3 monthly. 30 GB mail per user plus team file storage and the Workplace apps.
• Microsoft Exchange Online Plan 1: $4, paid yearly. 50 GB mailbox plus 50 GB archive, no device limit. It is sold on Microsoft's separate Exchange Online plans page, one licence per user.
• Zoho Mail Premium: $4, annual only. 50 GB mail plus 50 GB retention storage.
• Fastmail Standard: $5 annual, $6 monthly. 50 GB for mail, calendar and contacts plus 10 GB of files. This is Fastmail's cheapest plan that supports your own domain; the $3 Basic plan does not.
• Proton Mail Essentials: $6.99 annual, $7.99 monthly. 15 GB total storage per user, 3 custom domains.
• Google Workspace Business Starter: $7 annual, $8.40 monthly. 30 GB of pooled storage per user, shared across the organisation rather than a fixed mailbox quota; new customers see $6.30 for the first 12 months on the first 20 users.
• Microsoft 365 Business Basic: $7 annual, $8.40 monthly. 100 GB mailbox, 50 GB archive and 1 TB of cloud storage per user, web and mobile Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, and Teams.
• Exchange Online Plan 2 ($8, yearly) and Fastmail Professional ($9 annual, $10 monthly) are the 100 GB mailbox tiers with archive or retention.
• Google and Microsoft Business Standard: $14 annual, $16.80 monthly; Business Plus and Business Premium: $22 annual, $26.40 monthly. Google adds pooled storage (2 TB, then 5 TB with Vault); Microsoft adds the Office apps across devices, then enterprise-grade protection and a 1.5 TB archive.

Two prices on that list are not what they look like: IONOS's $1.10 is a 36-month commitment that roughly doubles afterwards, and Fastmail's $3 Basic plan does not support your own domain, so the Fastmail floor for [email protected] is $5.

Google and Microsoft cost exactly the same today

Read side by side, the two suites are priced identically at every business tier: $7, $14 and $22 per user per month on an annual commitment, $8.40, $16.80 and $26.40 on a monthly subscription, and both cap those plans at 300 users. Google's flexible prices had to be read off the rendered cards rather than the page text, but they match Microsoft's published monthly prices to the cent. The one difference in the base prices is Google's introductory 10% for new customers (first 20 users, 12 months), and that gap closes after year one.

Where they differ is what the dollars buy. At $7, Microsoft gives each user a 100 GB mailbox, a 50 GB archive and 1 TB of cloud storage; Google gives 30 GB of pooled storage per user, shared across the organisation. At $14 Google jumps to 2 TB pooled while Microsoft adds Word, Excel and PowerPoint across devices and keeps the same mailbox. For "how much mail can I keep for $7", Microsoft holds more than three times as much; for "which suite does my team already know", price will not decide it.

The monthly-billing premium runs from 11% to 50%

Every vendor that sells both terms charges more for the freedom to cancel, but not by the same amount. Divide the monthly price by the annual one:

• Google and Microsoft: 20% at all three tiers ($8.40 against $7, and so on).
• Zoho Workplace Standard: 50% ($3 against $2), and Zoho Mail Lite and Mail Premium have no monthly plan at all.
• Proton Mail Essentials: 14% ($7.99 against $6.99).
• Fastmail: 20% on Standard ($6 against $5), 11% on Professional ($10 against $9), 33% on Basic.
• IONOS quotes every plan on the page we read only with a 3-year term, with the struck regular price ($4 on Mail Basic 1) as the comparison; its published discount runs the other way, 50% to 73% off for committing to 36 months.

That premium is the price of an exit. Twenty percent on a $7 plan is $16.80 a year per user; fifty percent on a $2 plan is $12. Among the plans read, the cheaper plans tend to carry the steeper monthly premium.

What the $1 to $2 tier leaves out

Zoho Mail Lite is the cleanest $1 on this list: annual only, 5 GB, custom domain. Zoho's Forever Free plan covers one domain and up to five users at 5 GB each, but excludes IMAP, POP and ActiveSync, so it is webmail only, and only in select data centers.

Namecheap prices by plan, not by seat, and the add-on column is where it gets interesting: an additional mailbox is $8.88 a year on Launch, $25.88 on Expand and $39.88 on Scale. So the cheapest route to ten 5 GB mailboxes is the smallest plan plus nine add-ons, $14.88 plus nine times $8.88, or $94.80 a year (79 cents a mailbox a month), if Namecheap lets you stack that many on its smallest plan; the page only says to talk to sales above 50 accounts. Scale plus five add-ons costs $271.28 for the same count, because a Scale add-on is 2.8 times the rate of the mailboxes it comes with.

IONOS puts "Starting at $1.10 a month" in its hero and "with a 3-year term" under every card. Mail Basic 1 is $1.10 for 36 months and then $2; Mail Basic 25, which is 25 accounts of 2 GB, is $2 a month in term and then $4. If 25 tiny mailboxes for $4 a month is what you need, that is 16 cents each; if you need one normal mailbox, you are signing three years for a mailbox that costs ten cents a month more than Zoho Mail Lite and holds 2 GB instead of 5.

Fastmail Basic at $3 sits on the business tab and lists shared addresses such as [email protected], but the feature table marks "Use your own domains" as not supported on Basic. Standard at $5 is the real Fastmail business floor.

Storage per dollar, and why the unit matters

Dividing quota by price is the fastest comparison, as long as you notice the vendors do not sell the same unit: Zoho, Microsoft, Fastmail and Namecheap quote mail storage, Google quotes pooled storage shared across the organisation, Proton quotes total storage across mail and files. With that caveat, gigabytes per dollar of monthly price on an annual plan run from about 22 (Zoho Workplace Professional, 100 GB for $4.50) and 15 (Zoho Workplace Standard) through 14 (Microsoft Business Basic), 12.5 (Exchange Online Plan 1), 10 (Fastmail Standard) and 5 (Zoho Mail Lite) down to 4.3 (Google Business Starter, pooled), 2.1 (Proton Mail Essentials, total) and 1 (IONOS Mail Basic 1 after its term). Proton is the comparison that surprised us: within a cent of Google Starter on an annual plan and half the storage. Proton's card sells security features and migration from other suites, not storage.

A ten-person company, one year, annual plans

List prices, before tax, no introductory discounts unless stated:

• Zoho Mail Lite: $120.
• Namecheap Launch plus nine add-on mailboxes: $94.80 (5 GB each).
• IONOS Mail Basic 25: $24 in each year of a 36-month term, $48 a year afterwards, for up to 25 accounts of 2 GB. This is a three-year commitment, not a one-year bill.
• Zoho Workplace Standard: $240.
• Exchange Online Plan 1: $480.
• Fastmail Standard: $600.
• Proton Mail Essentials: $838.80.
• Google Business Starter: $840, or $756 in the first year with the new-customer discount.
• Microsoft 365 Business Basic: $840.

The spread between Zoho Mail Lite and the two big suites is $720 a year for ten people. If the suite replaces a separate video tool, file store and document editor, Google or Microsoft at $84 a head is the cheaper stack. If the mailbox is the whole requirement, that $720 buys brand comfort.

Self-hosting: the free server costs $48 a month

The self-hosted option looks like $0 until you read the software's own requirements. mailcow, a widely used open-source mail stack, states a default minimum of 6 GiB of RAM plus 1 GiB of swap and 20 GiB of disk before any mail is stored. On DigitalOcean's Basic Droplet list, the first Regular CPU size at or above 6 GiB is the 8 GiB, 4 vCPU box at $48 a month, $576 a year. At ten mailboxes that is $4.80 a user a month, more than any Zoho plan, Exchange Online Plan 1 or Fastmail Standard; at fifty it is 96 cents, and by then the person patching the box costs more than the box.

mailcow itself notes that "a pure MTA can run on 128 MiB," so on paper a bare mail transfer agent fits the smallest $4 to $6 droplets; we did not test that. That is infrastructure, not a hosted mailbox, which is how our private email server cost breakdown treats it.

Trials, refunds and what happens to your data

Google offers a 14-day trial. Microsoft offers one month, converts automatically to a paid plan and requires a card at sign-up. Zoho gives 15 days of its highest edition with no card, Fastmail up to 30 days free, Namecheap $0 for the first month before the annual renewal, and Proton and IONOS a 30-day money-back guarantee. The exit terms matter more: Microsoft's 7-day prorated refund window and its statement that a cancelled subscription's data is deleted are the two lines most buyers never read.

Which one to buy

You need a mailbox on your domain and nothing else: Zoho Mail Lite at $1, or Namecheap if you are adding several mailboxes and price the add-on route. Zoho Mail Lite is annual only; the Namecheap prices here are its yearly plans.

You need mail plus a light suite for under $3: Zoho Workplace Standard at $2 annual, 30 GB, with a 50% penalty if you insist on monthly billing.

You need a large mailbox sold on its own: Exchange Online Plan 1 at $4 for 50 GB plus 50 GB archive, or Fastmail Standard at $5.

The suite is the point: Google and Microsoft cost the same, so decide on storage shape and on the apps your team already uses.

The mailboxes are for cold outreach: none of these prices is the number that matters. Outreach is priced per sending domain and per warmed inbox, with reputation as the constraint, which is why we build dedicated email infrastructure for clients instead of stacking Workspace seats, and why our cold email service budgets domains before mailboxes. Start with how many domains you need.

Last check: confirm the price at checkout with your user count entered. Google's discount stops at 20 users, the Google and Microsoft business plans stop at 300, Namecheap tells you to talk to sales above 50 accounts or 20 domains, and IONOS's headline needs 36 months.