A cheaper Google Workspace alternative for email
If you only wanted the email part, per-seat pricing is a bad deal. Here is what the numbers look like and what you give up.
Most teams who look for a Google Workspace alternative are not unhappy with Gmail. They are unhappy with the bill — specifically with the fact that it grows every time the team does, for a product where the marginal cost of another mailbox is close to zero.
What the numbers look like
Workspace Business Starter is roughly $7 per user per month. Per-domain pricing does not move with headcount. The table starts at two people because a single address on your own domain is free here — there is nothing to compare until you want a second one:
| Team size | Per-seat at $7 | Per-domain at $10 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 people | $14 / mo | $10 / mo | 1.4× |
| 3 people | $21 / mo | $10 / mo | 2.1× |
| 5 people | $35 / mo | $10 / mo | 3.5× |
| 10 people | $70 / mo | $10 / mo | 7× |
| 25 people | $175 / mo | $10 / mo | 17.5× |
The gap widens with every hire, which is the opposite of how most SaaS costs behave and the entire reason this category exists.
What you give up
Being honest about this matters more than the price table. Workspace is not just email — it is Docs, Sheets, Drive, Meet, Calendar, and an admin console with device management and audit logs. If your team runs on those, replacing your email provider saves you $10 a month and costs you a migration you did not want.
Switching makes sense when email is the only part you were paying for. A lot of small teams already live in Notion, Slack and Figma, and keep Workspace running purely so their domain has mail. That is the case worth changing.
What to keep
- Your domain — nothing about it changes except DNS records.
- Your addresses — recreate
hello@,support@and the rest, as many as you want. - Your ability to leave — mail is stored as standard MIME and downloadable.
How the switch actually goes
Add the domain, paste the DNS records your registrar asks for, and confirm. Receiving starts as soon as the MX record resolves; sending waits for DKIM to propagate, which can take up to 72 hours. Do not delete the old mailboxes until you have seen mail arrive in the new ones — mail is one of the few systems where a rollback is genuinely painful.