Cheap business email that doesn’t charge per mailbox

Cheapest business email for one project, and for several

It depends on how many mailboxes you end up with. Every other plan in this cheap business email comparison charges by the mailbox, or in Namecheap’s case by the bundle. For one mailbox on one domain, Zoho, Hostinger and Namecheap all cost less than Digismak.

The count grows as you ship. A second project whose mail you want kept apart is a second mailbox. A cofounder is a third.

Digismak’s price is flat. It runs on your own Cloudflare account, where one Workers Paid plan at $5 a month covers every address on every domain in the account. From 6 mailboxes it costs less than every per-mailbox plan here. And if you already pay for Workers Paid, sending costs nothing more.

How to read the table:

• Count one mailbox for each person, and one for each project whose mail you want in its own inbox.
• Hostinger advertises Business Starter at $0.39 a mailbox a month. That price needs 48 months paid upfront, and the plan then renews at $1.59, the figure used here. At the intro price, Digismak costs less from 13 mailboxes.
• Zoho Mail Lite can only be paid yearly, so 3 mailboxes are $36 for the year in one go.
• Namecheap sells bundles of 1, 3 or 5 mailboxes for $14.88, $41.88 or $71.88 a year. With every mailbox used, that’s $1.16 to $1.24 a mailbox a month. A promo code lowers the first year only. Past 5 mailboxes you add more at a separate price, so check Namecheap’s page if you need that many.
• Google and Microsoft are shown on yearly billing, and both include office apps. If that’s what you’re weighing, see our Google Workspace alternative page.

What $5 a month includes

One Workers Paid plan, paid to Cloudflare, covers every domain in your Cloudflare account. With Digismak on top, it gets you:

• Every address on every domain: your own, plus shared addresses like support@, hello@ and billing@ that anyone you add to the domain can read and answer.
• Unlimited receiving, through Cloudflare Email Routing.
• 3,000 sent emails a month for the whole account, then $0.35 per 1,000.
• Sign-in without passwords: a 6-digit code sent to an email address you already use.
• An admin console to add a cofounder or a contractor later, and to suspend or remove them.
• An inbox that works in a phone’s browser. An admin can keep images from senders blocked until someone allows them.

Adding a person, or another domain in the same Cloudflare account, doesn’t change the price. Sending is the only part that can cost more. Say your projects send 5,000 emails between them in a month. You pay $5 plus $0.70 for the 2,000 over the allowance: $5.70 in total.

Affordable business email for every project in your Cloudflare account

Connect each domain and it gets its own inbox, with its own addresses, labels, name, icon and sign-in page. You switch between projects from the top of the inbox with one login, so mail for your SaaS stays out of the inbox for your newsletter.

Domains in the same Cloudflare account share its Workers Paid plan. When you launch another project, you connect its domain and pick hello@ and support@. The bill stays where it was.

Cheap email hosting that costs less than Digismak

Some hosts charge per account instead of per mailbox. Two are worth knowing about, and one of them costs less than $5 a month however many mailboxes you need.

Purelymail is $10 a year for the whole account, with no hard limits on users, domains or storage; heavy use moves you to pay-as-you-go pricing. It sends about 3,000 emails a day and works with desktop mail apps over IMAP. In its own words, it’s a small team with no 24/7 support, and it doesn’t allow marketing email.

Migadu also charges per account. Its Micro plan is $19 a year but allows 20 outgoing emails a day for the whole account, so check that against how much support mail you answer. Mini, at $90 a year, allows 100.

If the lowest price and a desktop mail app matter most, pick Purelymail. Pick Digismak if you’d rather send and receive through your own Cloudflare account, with a separate inbox for each project in the browser and no passwords to manage. There’s a side-by-side on Purelymail vs Digismak.

Will cheap email land in spam?

Receiving servers can’t see what you pay. They check three DNS records on your domain. SPF says which servers may send for it. DKIM proves your domain signed the message and nobody changed it. DMARC tells them what to do when those checks fail.

Digismak’s setup adds all three. It adds an SPF record for Cloudflare and turns on DKIM signing through Cloudflare Email Sending. If your domain has no DMARC record, it adds one at p=none, a monitoring mode that doesn’t block anything else that sends as your domain. That matters if your app already sends receipts or password resets from the same domain. The last setup step sends a real email through the whole path. To see what your domain has today, run our free SPF, DKIM and DMARC checker.

How to get started

Setup is automatic and usually takes a few minutes, most of it Cloudflare verifying your domain.

1. Check your domain

   Enter it on this page. Digismak reads its DNS and current email setup. If Google, Microsoft or another provider receives your mail today, setup says so and waits for you to confirm before switching.

2. Connect Cloudflare

   Digismak opens Cloudflare’s token page with the permissions already filled in. Limit the token to that one domain, create it and paste it in. You can delete the token on Cloudflare at any time.

3. Let setup run

   Digismak turns on Email Routing, adds the MX and SPF records, turns on Email Sending with DKIM, and sends a test email through the whole path. It finishes in the background, so you don’t have to stay on the page.

4. Pick your addresses

   Choose your own address and add shared ones like support@ or hello@. On Cloudflare’s free plan, receiving works straight away and sending switches on when you upgrade to Workers Paid.

The catches

Read these before you sign up:

• Your domain’s DNS must be on Cloudflare. Moving it there is free, and the domain can stay registered where it is.
• It’s a browser inbox. There’s no IMAP, POP or SMTP access, so Outlook, Apple Mail and Thunderbird can’t connect. It works in your phone’s browser.
• It’s for people writing to people, not newsletters. Each email goes to at most 50 recipients, and each person can email up to 200 people in 24 hours. Cloudflare also starts new accounts on a lower daily sending quota that rises over time.
• Outgoing attachments can be up to 3.5 MB per email.
• Everyone you add to a domain can read its shared addresses. You can’t limit support@ to some people.
• There’s no calendar, documents or video calls, and no import of old mail yet.
• Each domain’s sign-in page is on a digismak.com address. Putting it on your own domain, like mail.yourproject.com, is Pro at $3 a month per domain. The first 50 domains get Pro free during early access, and after that there’s a waitlist.
• Digismak is free during early access. That isn’t a promise that it stays free.