Google Workspace alternatives
Google Workspace Business Starter is $7 per user per month on an annual term — $420 a year for five people. Every option on this page costs less, and most of them cost dramatically less.
They are ordered by price, cheapest first, which is why ours is at the top. Read the “watch out” column before you read the price column; it is the one that will actually affect your year.
We build one of these. The last section says plainly when you should ignore all of it and stay where you are.
Why people leave Google Workspace.
You are paying for a suite and using the mail
The documents moved to Notion, the calls moved to Slack or Zoom, the files are in Dropbox and Figma and GitHub. What is left on the invoice is Gmail with your domain in the From line, priced as an office suite.
Per-seat pricing bills you for growth that costs nothing
A mailbox that receives four messages a week costs a mail server almost exactly what a busy one costs: nearly nothing. The real costs are storage and bandwidth. Per-seat pricing measures your headcount instead, so every hire raises the bill by $84 a year.
The free tier is long gone
A lot of people on this page are here because the legacy free G Suite tier ended and a domain that had cost nothing for a decade suddenly came with an invoice.
The storage is per user and does not pool down
Thirty gigabytes each sounds generous until you notice that the person with 2 GB cannot lend any of it to the person with 29.
What to check before you move.
Five questions. Every one of them has caught somebody out, including on this list.
1 What is the price for the number of people you actually have?
Headline prices are almost always quoted per user per month, which is the unit designed to feel small. Multiply by your headcount and by twelve before comparing anything.
2 What is metered, and what happens when you cross it?
Every provider on this list meters something — storage, messages per day, or seats. Find out which, and find out whether crossing the line costs money, throttles you, or bounces mail.
3 Can you leave?
IMAP is the whole answer. If a provider speaks it, your archive is portable and the decision is reversible. If the only way out is an export button, treat that as the price of entry.
4 Do you need the parts that are not email?
Calendar, documents, video and shared drives are the actual reason Workspace costs what it does. If you need them, most of this page is not for you, and that is a legitimate answer.
5 Who is on the other end when it breaks?
Several options here, ours included, are very small operations. That is not disqualifying — but it is a different thing from a support contract, and you should price it honestly.
8 options, cheapest first.
A year for 5 people, at list prices read off each provider’s own page on 12 August 2026. We are at the top because the arithmetic puts us there — the “watch out” column is where we take our turn.
FranklyMail That’s us
$9
Flat, plus storage you use
- Best for
- Households and small teams who want unlimited mailboxes on their own domains and nothing else.
- Watch out
- We are new, there are no apps, no calendar, and our sending IPs are still on a warm-up ladder. Storage over 10 GB is billed at $0.40/GB/yr.
Purelymail
~$10
Flat, or per-resource
- Best for
- The same buyer as us, with six more years of operating history behind it.
- Watch out
- Spartan interface, and you are trusted on fair use rather than given a quota.
Migadu
$19 on Micro
Flat, tiered by messages per day
- Best for
- Large archives and light sending — storage is soft and mail never bounces for a full mailbox.
- Watch out
- Micro allows 20 outgoing messages a day across the account. A working team is usually on Mini, at $90.
MXroute
$59
Flat, tiered by storage
- Best for
- People who want unlimited domains and mailboxes from an operator with a long track record and a human on support.
- Watch out
- Ten gigabytes costs $59 a year here. The panel is a traditional hosting control panel.
Zoho Mail Lite
$60
$1 per user per month
- Best for
- Teams who want a full suite shaped like Workspace at a fraction of the price.
- Watch out
- Still per-seat, so it grows with headcount. The free plan does not include IMAP, POP or ActiveSync at all — webmail only.
Fastmail
$132 on Family
Flat up to 6, then per user
- Best for
- Anyone who wants the best apps in this category, plus calendar, contacts and Masked Email.
- Watch out
- Family is a household plan. A team buys Business Standard, which is $300 a year for five.
Proton Mail
~$240
$3.99 per user per month
- Best for
- People whose reason for leaving is privacy rather than price.
- Watch out
- IMAP and SMTP need the Proton Bridge on a desktop, and Mail Plus covers one custom domain.
Self-hosting
A server, plus your weekends
Free software, rented server
- Best for
- People who want to learn how email works, or who already run infrastructure and have the mailboxes to justify it.
- Watch out
- The install is the easy part. IP reputation, key rotation and blocklist delisting are the job, and they are yours at whatever hour they happen.
Which one, for you.
Two of these answers are “stay where you are”. They are there because they are sometimes right.
| If you are… | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A family or household, up to six people | Fastmail Family, or us | $132 buys apps, calendar and contacts that we do not have. $9 buys mailboxes and nothing else. Both are reasonable; the question is whether anyone in the house will open an app. |
| A studio or agency of three to ten | FranklyMail or Purelymail | This is the case per-seat pricing punishes hardest, and where a flat price stops being a rounding error and starts being the whole invoice. |
| You keep a decade of mail and rarely send | Migadu | Their storage is soft and unmetered. Ours is metered above 10 GB, so a large archive is exactly the case where they are cheaper than us. |
| Privacy is the reason you are leaving | Proton Mail | End-to-end encryption between Proton users is a real feature and we do not have an equivalent. Note it costs roughly $240 a year for five, so you are paying for the privacy, not saving money. |
| You need SSO, retention holds or an audit trail | Stay on Google Workspace | Nothing on this list replaces those, ours least of all. If a client, an auditor or a regulator asks for them, the cheap options are not options. |
| Docs and Drive are how your company works | Stay on Google Workspace | You are not overpaying for email. You are paying for a suite and using the suite, which is what it is priced for. |
| You want to understand how email actually works | Self-host it | Mailcow or Stalwart on a VPS, and a year of your weekends. You will learn more than any of the rest of this page can teach you. |
Fair questions.
- What is the cheapest Google Workspace alternative?
- For a single light user, Purelymail’s per-resource pricing can land under everything else here, including our $9. For five people, we are the cheapest on this list at $9 a year, with Purelymail a dollar behind. Below about $20 a year the differences stop being about money and start being about who you want running your mail.
- Can I move my Gmail archive to any of these?
- To all of them, over IMAP, plus Google Takeout for a full mbox export. Google has never made leaving hard, which is worth saying on a page like this one.
- Will my mail break while I switch?
- Not if you do it in the right order. Mail follows the MX record, so you set up the new provider, verify the records, and only then change MX. Until that moment, Workspace keeps delivering exactly as it does today.
- Do any of these replace Docs, Drive and Meet?
- Zoho Workplace comes closest and costs a fraction of Workspace. The rest of this list, ours included, is email only. If you need the suite, keep the suite.
Prefer a straight comparison?
If the cheap one turns out to be the right one, it’s $9/yr.
30-day refund, and cancel in one click.