Custom domain email: the four honest ways to get you@yourdomain

You can get email at your own domain for $1 a month, $7 a seat, $50 flat, or nearly free, depending on what you are willing to give up. The options are not interchangeable: they differ in who pays, how the cost grows as people join, and how much plumbing you personally maintain. This article prices all four honestly, as of August 2026, and shows the DNS you will paste no matter which one you choose. For the full walk from bare domain to working inbox, start with our business email setup guide.

The domain is the decision, not the provider

An address at gmail.com or outlook.com is rented identity. If you ever leave, the address dies with the account, and every contact, login, and invoice pointed at it goes stale. An address at your own domain works the other way around: the provider behind it can change any Tuesday, and nobody who writes to you will notice. You repoint one MX record and mail flows to the new place.

That portability is negotiating power. Per-seat suites have raised prices repeatedly (Google Workspace in 2019, 2023, and 2025; Microsoft 365 most recently on July 1, 2026), and the renters absorb each increase because leaving would cost them their address. Domain owners can shop. Which name to put in front of the @ is its own question, covered in our guide to professional email addresses.

The four honest options

Prices below are US list prices, taken from the 14-provider dataset behind our email pricing guide and last verified against each provider's live pricing page on 7 August 2026.

Workspace suites

The default for a reason. Google Workspace Business Starter is $7 per user per month on annual billing ($8.40 month-to-month) and brings Gmail's spam filtering, Docs, Drive, Meet, and up to 30 free aliases per user. Microsoft 365 Business Basic matches the $7 and adds Teams and OneDrive; it took a price rise from $6 on July 1, 2026. The catch is arithmetic: every person who needs a mailbox is another seat, forever, and you cannot mix editions on one domain. Ten people on Google Business Standard is $140 a month.

Email hosting

This strips out the office suite and keeps the mailbox. Zoho Mail Lite is the credible floor at $1 per user per month, billed annually only, with IMAP and multiple domains. Zoho still runs a genuinely free plan for up to 5 users, but it is web-and-app only: no IMAP, no POP, so Apple Mail and Outlook cannot connect to it. Cheap, honest, per-seat.

Free Gmail with your domain in front of it

The tinkerer's route: inbound mail forwarded to a free Gmail account, outbound sent through SMTP credentials so the From address shows your domain. Total cost can be $0. The honest version of this how-to is below, including the part where it stops being fun.

A flat per-domain workspace

This is what we build. LetterDuck is $50 per domain with unlimited addresses, because an address in our system is a routing rule, not a paid seat. Newsletter sending and deliverability management are in the same flat price. The honest catch: we are email only. If your team lives in shared documents and video calls, a suite earns its per-seat price and you should pay it.

The DNS you will paste regardless

Whichever provider you pick, the setup ends at your DNS panel with the same four records. Only the values change. Here they are with Google Workspace values as the worked example.

Mail routing, one MX record (Google moved from five records to one in April 2023; new setups need only this):

Type: MX    Host: @    Priority: 1    Value: smtp.google.com

SPF, a TXT record naming who may send for your domain:

Type: TXT   Host: @    Value: "v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all"

DKIM, a public key your provider generates for you (the long p= value comes from their admin panel):

Type: TXT   Host: google._domainkey
Value: "v=DKIM1; k=rsa; p=MIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQ..."

DMARC, your policy for mail that fails the first two. Start at p=none, read the reports, then tighten:

Type: TXT   Host: _dmarc
Value: "v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:dmarc-reports@yourdomain.com"

That is the whole ceremony. What each record does, and what breaks when it is wrong, is covered in our pieces on MX records and how SPF, DKIM, and DMARC interlock. Two of the four records exist purely for authentication, and they are not optional decoration: since November 2025 Gmail hard-rejects unauthenticated mail with a 550 error rather than filing it under spam, and Microsoft has done the same since May 2025.

The free-ish way: Gmail behind your domain, done honestly

This route works. We ran a version of it ourselves before building our own inbox, so what follows includes the failure modes the cheerful tutorials leave out.

Step 1: put a forwarder in front of Gmail. Cloudflare Email Routing is free and is what we use in production: enable Email Routing on your domain, let it install its MX and SPF records automatically, and add a rule forwarding hello@yourdomain.com to your Gmail address. A catch-all rule forwards every address at the domain, typos included; we wrote up what running a catch-all is actually like.

Step 2: teach Gmail to send as your domain. In Gmail: the gear icon, then See all settings, then Accounts and Import, then "Send mail as", then "Add another email address". Free Gmail now requires real SMTP credentials at this step: a server, a port (587 with TLS), a username, and a password. Gmail's own servers will not do it. The credentials come from wherever you can get authenticated sending for your domain, typically an SMTP relay's free tier or a $1 Zoho seat.

Step 3: verify. Gmail emails a confirmation code to the new address, which arrives back in the same Gmail inbox via your forwarding. Paste the code, and the address appears in your From dropdown.

Now the honest part. That verification is per address. hello@ and sales@ and billing@ are three separate setups with three separate confirmations, and an address you never verified is an address you cannot reply from. Reply to a message that came in for press@ and Gmail will quietly send it from the wrong identity. There are also alignment traps: if the relay signing your outbound mail does not DKIM-sign with your domain, DMARC fails on mail you legitimately sent.

We know exactly where this road ends because we drove it. The per-alias verification grind is the direct reason LetterDuck verifies the domain once and then lets you reply from any address on it, no ceremony per address. As a free setup for one person with two addresses, the Gmail route is fine. As a system for a team or a growing pile of addresses, it is a part-time job.

Which one to pick

Take the position that fits your constraint, and know the tradeoff you accepted.

Your team lives in shared docs and meetings: pay Google or Microsoft their $7 per seat and stop thinking about it. The tradeoff is that the bill tracks headcount forever. One person, lowest possible cost, no plumbing: Zoho Mail Lite at $1, prepaid for a year. Zero budget and a taste for wiring: free Gmail plus forwarding, eyes open about per-address verification. Lots of addresses, a newsletter, a small team that answers mail together: a flat per-domain workspace like ours is the shape built for it, and it is the wrong pick if what you actually need is an office suite.

Buy the domain tonight; pick the provider tomorrow. Only one of those decisions is hard to reverse.