Which is cheaper, Migadu or Purelymail?

Purelymail, at ~$10 a year against Migadu Micro at $19 — and the gap widens for a team, because five people usually need Migadu Mini at $90. Both are far below any per-seat provider, so the price difference between them is rarely the thing that should decide it.

Do both give unlimited mailboxes?

Yes, and unlimited domains, on every plan. That is the shared premise of both products: you should not pay per person for addresses that cost a mail server almost nothing.

Does Purelymail have a storage limit?

Not a hard one. It runs on fair use, with an optional per-resource billing mode if you would rather pay for exactly what you store and send. Migadu takes the opposite approach and publishes its daily message limits per tier.

Are these safe to run a business on?

Both have been running for years with real customers, and both expect you to manage your own DNS records and bring your own mail client. Neither offers an enterprise SLA. If you need a support contract with a name on it, this whole category — ours included — is the wrong shelf.

Comparison

Migadu vs Purelymail

Both reject per-seat pricing, both give you unlimited mailboxes and unlimited domains, and both are small operations run by people who mean it. If you are on this page you have already worked out that per-seat pricing is a headcount tax.

Migadu is $19 a year on Micro and $90 on Mini. Purelymail is ~$10 a year with no hard storage limit, billed on fair use rather than a quota.

The difference is what each one asks you to predict: Migadu asks how much mail you will send per day, Purelymail asks you to trust and be trusted. Neither is a trick.

Skip to the table

Side by side.

A year of email for five people. List prices, read off each provider’s own page on 12 August 2026. Our column is here because leaving ourselves out of our own table would be coy, not because this page is about us.

Migadu vs Purelymail: annual cost and features for 5 people, with FranklyMail as a third column.
Per year, 5 people	Migadu	Purelymail	FranklyMail
Price per year, 5 people	$19 on Micro	~$10	$9
The tier a working team usually needs	$90 on Mini	~$10 — one plan	$9
Pricing model	Flat, tiered by messages per day	Flat, or advanced per-resource billing	Flat, plus storage you use
Mailboxes	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Custom domains	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Storage	5 GB on Micro, 30 GB on Mini — soft, mail never bounces	No hard limit, fair use	10 GB pooled, then $0.40/GB/yr
Outgoing messages per day	20 on Micro, 100 on Mini	No per-account tier	No per-account tier
IMAP, POP3, SMTP	Yes	Yes	Yes
JMAP	No	No	Yes
Sieve filters	Yes	Yes	Yes
Catch-all	Yes	Yes	Yes
Money back	—	Prepaid credit	30 days, unconditional
Running since	Before us, by years	2019	2026

The same conclusion, reached two different ways

Both of these providers looked at per-seat email pricing and decided it measures the wrong thing. A mail server does not care how many people are on it; it cares about bytes stored and bytes moved. Ten mailboxes belonging to people who get a dozen plaintext messages a week cost almost nothing, and billing them as ten seats is billing your headcount.

Having agreed on that, they disagreed on what to charge for instead. Migadu picked throughput and published the numbers: Micro allows 20 outgoing and 200 incoming messages a day, Mini raises those to 100 and 1,000, and storage is left deliberately soft so mail never bounces for a full mailbox.

Purelymail picked trust. There is no hard storage limit and no published daily cap — you are on fair use, with an advanced per-resource billing mode available if you would rather pay for exactly what you consume. For most people that is simpler than a tier, right up until the moment you want to know precisely where the line is.

Which uncertainty you would rather have

This is the real choice, and it is not a features question. Migadu tells you the limit and charges you when you cross it. Purelymail does not draw the line and asks you to be reasonable. Both are defensible; they fail differently.

Migadu’s failure mode is arithmetic you can do in advance. Five people replying normally will pass 20 outgoing messages on an ordinary afternoon, so a working team should price Mini at $90 rather than Micro at $19 and stop thinking about it. Nothing surprises you later because the number was on the pricing page.

Purelymail’s failure mode is that a fair-use policy is only as good as the operator, and you cannot compute your exposure ahead of time. In six years of operating that appears to have suited its customers, which is itself the evidence. But if you are the kind of person who wants the quota written down, that is a real reason to pick the other one.

What both ask of you that a big provider does not

Neither of these is Gmail, and both expect a bit more from you at setup. You bring your own mail client. You publish your own DNS records — MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC — and you are responsible for noticing if one of them breaks later.

That is the trade for the price, and it is a fair one for anyone who can edit DNS. It is not a fair one for someone who cannot, and neither provider pretends otherwise. If DNS records are not a thing you are comfortable with, the honest recommendation on this page is a provider with a support contract, not a cheaper one.

Both are also small. That means a real person answers support, and it also means there is no enterprise SLA behind them. Weigh both halves of that sentence.

Buy Migadu if…

You want the limit written down, published, and the same for everybody.
You keep a large archive and send lightly — storage is soft and mail does not bounce.
You would rather buy a tier once and never think about fair use.
Ten years of operating history matters to you more than the last dollar.

How Migadu compares to us →

Buy Purelymail if…

You want one price with no tiers and no daily arithmetic.
Your sending is unpredictable and you would rather not forecast it.
Per-resource billing appeals: pay for exactly the storage and traffic you use.
You are comfortable on fair use with an operator that has run this way since 2019.

How Purelymail compares to us →

Where we fit, and where we do not

We built the same argument these two built, which makes this the page where we have the least to add and should say so. If you have narrowed the field to Migadu and Purelymail, you have found two providers doing the right thing, both with more operating history than us. Purelymail has run since 2019 and Migadu for longer still. We started in 2026, and there is no way to be six years old in a hurry.

What we do differently is meter storage explicitly and publish the rate: $9/yr a year covers unlimited mailboxes and unlimited domains with 10 GB pooled, and more is $0.40/GB/yr. That is a third answer to the question this page is about — not a published daily cap and not fair use, but a number you can multiply. We also speak JMAP, which neither of them does.

And two things they have that we do not: years, and a track record you can go and read. What we offer against that is a 30-day unconditional refund rather than a prepaid balance, so the cost of being wrong about us is a month rather than a credit you have to spend with us. That is a smaller promise than years of a service demonstrably staying up, and we would rather name the gap than paper over it.

Get started, $9/yr

Fair questions.

Which is cheaper, Migadu or Purelymail?: Purelymail, at ~$10 a year against Migadu Micro at $19 — and the gap widens for a team, because five people usually need Migadu Mini at $90. Both are far below any per-seat provider, so the price difference between them is rarely the thing that should decide it.
Do both give unlimited mailboxes?: Yes, and unlimited domains, on every plan. That is the shared premise of both products: you should not pay per person for addresses that cost a mail server almost nothing.
Does Purelymail have a storage limit?: Not a hard one. It runs on fair use, with an optional per-resource billing mode if you would rather pay for exactly what you store and send. Migadu takes the opposite approach and publishes its daily message limits per tier.
Are these safe to run a business on?: Both have been running for years with real customers, and both expect you to manage your own DNS records and bring your own mail client. Neither offers an enterprise SLA. If you need a support contract with a name on it, this whole category — ours included — is the wrong shelf.