LetterDuck vs Google Workspace: flat domain or per-seat suite
One is a full productivity suite priced per seat. The other is an email workspace priced per domain. The crossover point is eight seats, and the details matter.
What each one is
Google Workspace is Google's business suite: Gmail on your domain plus Docs, Sheets, Drive, Calendar, Meet, and, since January 2025, Gemini AI, all priced per user per month. It is the default choice for a reason. The spam filtering is the best in the business, the admin controls and third-party ecosystem are unmatched, and mid tiers carry 2 TB to 5 TB of storage per person. Every Business edition caps at 300 users, after which Google moves you to quote-only Enterprise pricing.
LetterDuck is an email workspace: a threaded team inbox covering every address on your domain, a newsletter composer with a designed template, and deliverability managed for you (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, a warm-up throttle, automatic suppression, RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe). It costs $50 per domain, flat, with unlimited addresses and seats. No Docs, no Drive, no video calls. It is currently in waitlist mode. If you are starting from zero rather than switching, our guide to setting up business email on your own domain walks the whole path.
What each costs
| Monthly cost at | Google Workspace | LetterDuck |
|---|---|---|
| 1 person | $7 | $50 flat |
| 5 people | $35 | $50 flat |
| 10 people | $70 | $50 flat |
Public list prices, August 2026, annual billing where offered. Google Workspace: Business Starter at $7 per user per month on annual billing. Business Standard is $14 and Business Plus $22. Month-to-month billing costs 20 percent more. LetterDuck is $50 per domain, flat, unlimited addresses and subscribers.
Prices above were last verified on August 7, 2026: edition limits and the 300-user cap from Google's own edition-comparison documentation, and the US dollar figures from two independent price listings dated January and July 2026, because Google's pricing page geo-serves local currency by IP and served us euros.
Per-seat pricing is a curve; flat pricing is a line. On Business Starter at $7 per user per month (annual billing), seven seats cost $49 and eight cost $56, so LetterDuck's $50 flat overtakes Google's cheapest plan at exactly eight people. On Business Standard at $14, the crossover is four. By ten seats you are at $840 a year on Starter and $1,680 a year on Standard against $600 flat. And the curve has a habit of shifting under you: Google raised prices in 2019, 2023, and again on January 16, 2025, when it bundled Gemini into every Business plan and added roughly $2 per user per month (Business Standard annual went from $12 to $14, about 17%), whether or not you wanted AI. Existing subscriptions migrated to the new pricing from March 17, 2025.
Two billing details are easy to miss. The "annual" plan is a 12-month commitment: billed monthly, but you owe the full year. Avoiding the commitment on the Flexible plan costs exactly 20% more per user ($8.40, $16.80, $26.40 for Starter, Standard, Plus). Neither is a scandal, but both belong in the math.
The quieter cost is the newsletter. Gmail caps outbound at roughly 2,000 recipients a day and mass marketing email violates Workspace policy, so a Workspace shop that wants a real newsletter buys a second product. That second bill is the one our flat price is designed to absorb. If you are weighing the whole field rather than just these two, our Google Workspace alternatives roundup covers the per-seat suites side by side, and Google Workspace pricing breaks down every edition.
Feature by feature
| Capability | Google Workspace | LetterDuck |
|---|---|---|
| Custom-domain email | Gmail, best-known interface in the world | threaded web workspace |
| Docs, Sheets, Drive | full suite, 30 GB to 5 TB per user | email only |
| Video meetings | Meet, 100 to 500 participants by tier | |
| Gemini AI | bundled since January 2025 (Gmail-only on Starter) | |
| Inbound spam filtering | best-in-class, decades of training data | standard filtering; pipeline monitored end to end |
| Admin, SSO, device management | unmatched controls and ecosystem | |
| Addresses on your domain | up to 30 free aliases per user; a new mailbox is a new paid seat | unlimited; an address is a routing rule, not a seat |
| Shared team inbox | needs a Google Groups workaround or a third-party tool | built in; whole domain in one threaded view |
| Reply from any address | per-user send-as aliases, configured each time | pick the From address on any reply |
| Newsletter sending | ~2,000 recipients/day cap; marketing mail violates policy | composer, templates, per-recipient unsubscribe |
| Deliverability managed | you configure and monitor DNS yourself | SPF, DKIM, DMARC, warm-up throttle, auto-suppression |
| Pricing model | $7 to $22 per user per month, 300-user cap | $50 per domain flat, unlimited seats |
| Billing flexibility | annual is a 12-month commitment; monthly costs 20% more | flat monthly |
Choose Google Workspace if
- Your team actually collaborates in Docs, Sheets, and Drive. Buying those separately to save on email is a false economy.
- You need SSO, managed devices, Vault retention, or eDiscovery. We have none of it.
- You are one to three people who just need mailboxes. At $7 a seat, Google is cheaper than us until seat eight.
- Inbound spam filtering is your single highest priority. Gmail's is genuinely the best, and we will not pretend otherwise.
- You want one vendor for files, calendars, meetings, and mail.
Choose LetterDuck if
- Five or more people answer mail on one domain and the per-seat line on the invoice keeps growing.
- You want support@, billing@, press@, and thirty more addresses without buying thirty seats or managing alias sprawl.
- You publish a newsletter from the same domain and are tired of paying a marketing platform on top of the suite. Small teams running both halves on one bill are exactly who we built this for.
- You would rather have deliverability handled (DNS, warm-up, suppression, one-click unsubscribe) than administer it.
- Three price rises in six years (2019, 2023, 2025) made you want a number that does not move with headcount.
Migrating from Workspace to LetterDuck
The move is a DNS change plus an export, not a rebuild. When your waitlist invite arrives:
- Export your existing mail with Google Takeout (mbox format). Large mailboxes take hours, occasionally longer, so start this first.
- Add the DNS records LetterDuck generates for your domain: MX for inbound, plus SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for authenticated sending. This is a ten-minute paste into your DNS panel.
- Recreate your addresses. Since an address is a routing rule with us, rebuilding thirty aliases takes minutes, not an afternoon of seat provisioning.
- Parallel-run for one billing cycle. Keep Workspace alive and forwarding while you confirm every address lands correctly.
- Check your annual commitment date before you cancel. On the annual plan you owe the remaining months either way, so time the cutover to your renewal.
Budget an hour of real work, a week or two of cautious parallel running, and zero downtime if you change MX records last. One reason we are strict about step 2: in June 2026 we watched Gmail reject 73% of mail we mirrored via plain forwarding because forwarding broke DMARC alignment, and mail simply vanished with no error. We rebuilt that path around an authenticated API insert. Gmail's strictness is real, in both directions, and correct DNS is what keeps you on the right side of it.