How much does a business email address cost in 2026?

Why business email is priced two different ways

Every business email price on the market is one of two shapes. Per-user pricing sells a mailbox: a new inbox, storage and a login for each person, and the address comes with it. Per-domain pricing sells the address: mail to it is delivered into inboxes that already exist, and you pay once for the domain however many addresses you create. The first shape costs more with every hire; the second costs more with every domain. Knowing which one you are buying explains every price on this page.

Per-user is the shape most people know because it is what Google and Microsoft sell. It is the right shape when the mailbox is the point: a team that shares calendars, edits documents together and needs an administrator. Per-domain is the shape most small businesses actually need and rarely hear about: the owner already has a Gmail she checks forty times a day, and what she wants is for info@ and her own name at the business domain to arrive there and to be sendable from there.

The prices in this guide were read from each supplier's pricing page on 17 September 2026, in US dollars, on an annual term where one exists. Flexible monthly billing is usually about 20 percent higher. Tax is excluded everywhere. Where a supplier advertises a promotional discount for the first months, the list price is used, because that is what you pay in year two.

What per-user business email costs

Three suppliers cover almost the whole per-user market for small businesses. Google Workspace Business Starter was 7 dollars per user per month on an annual commitment, or 8.40 on flexible billing, with 30 GB of pooled storage per user. Microsoft 365 Business Basic was 6 dollars per user per month on an annual term, with Outlook, Teams and 1 TB of OneDrive. Zoho Mail Lite was 1 dollar per user per month on an annual term for a 5 GB mailbox, with larger plans at 1.25 and up.

The unit is the important word. A user is a mailbox that someone logs into. Addresses that do not belong to a person, such as sales@, support@ or billing@, are aliases on someone's mailbox and are free on all three, up to a limit. Where per-user pricing surprises people is the second kind of address: the part-timer, the contractor, the seasonal hire, the shared front-desk login. Each one is a full licence, every month, whether or not the mailbox is opened.

What per-domain business email costs

The cheapest per-domain option is the one you assemble yourself: a domain at 10 to 15 dollars a year for a .com, free forwarding at the registrar, and Gmail's Send mail as for replies. It costs nothing beyond the domain and it works, with two caveats that the guide on using a custom domain without Workspace covers in detail: nobody writes the authentication records for you, and nobody tells you when the forwarding hop starts dropping mail.

A per-domain routing service is the same mechanism with an operator. Brand My Inbox prices it at zero for one address on one domain, 39 dollars a year on Personal for unlimited addresses delivered to up to a handful of inboxes each, 12 dollars a month on Pro for more destinations and monitoring, and 35 dollars a month on Professional for several domains. The records are written and watched on every plan, including the free one, because unauthenticated mail is bad for everyone's reputation, not only the sender's.

The costs that are not on the price list

Three costs show up on nobody's pricing page. The first is migration: moving years of mail into a new mailbox takes hours, and moving it back out when you leave takes more. Per-domain routing avoids it entirely because the mailbox does not change. The second is the licence for the person who left: per-user plans keep billing until an administrator removes the user, and the departmental address that person owned needs a new home first.

The third is deliverability. A business address that lands in spam costs more than any subscription, and it is priced at zero on every list because it is a failure rather than a feature. The three DNS records that prevent it, SPF, DKIM and DMARC, are configured for you on Workspace and Microsoft 365 for their own servers, left to you on the do-it-yourself route, and written and monitored on a routing service. If you send from more than one system, a website form, an invoicing tool, a newsletter, the records have to cover all of them, whoever set up the mailbox.

Three businesses, priced end to end

1. 1

   A freelance designer: one person, three addresses

   Her name, hello@ and invoices@. She already lives in Gmail. Per domain: 39 dollars a year plus the domain. Per user: 84 dollars a year for one Workspace user with two aliases, plus the migration of eight years of client mail. She keeps her Gmail.

2. 2

   A dental clinic: five people, eight addresses

   Two dentists, a hygienist and two front-desk staff; appointments@, billing@ and records@ that several people watch. Per domain: 144 dollars a year on Pro so each departmental address reaches up to twenty inboxes. Per user: 420 on Workspace. The clinic also wants a shared calendar for the chairs, which tips it to Workspace for the two dentists and per-domain routing for everything else: about 312 dollars a year.

3. 3

   A twenty-person agency with client domains

   Twenty staff who edit documents together all day: Workspace, 1,680 dollars a year, and worth it. Twelve client domains, each needing a couple of addresses that reach the account manager: per-domain routing on an agency plan rather than twelve more Workspace tenants, each client's addresses reaching its account manager's existing inbox.

The pattern across all three is the same. Mailboxes for the people who need mailboxes, addresses for everything else, and the domain's authentication records covering both. The cheapest business email is not the lowest number on the price sheet; it is the one where you are not paying per person for things that are not people.