Small business email hosting, without the per-seat meter
Per-seat suites charge for headcount. LetterDuck charges for the domain: $50 flat, unlimited addresses, and hire number eleven costs nothing.
A ten-person company pays Google $840 a year for mailboxes before anyone opens a document. That is Business Starter at $7 per user per month on annual billing, the cheapest plan Workspace sells. Microsoft charges the same $7 for Business Basic, after a July 2026 increase of 16 percent. On either suite the meter runs one direction: every hire is another seat, and every seat is another line on the invoice.
The history says the meter also speeds up. Google raised Workspace prices in 2019, in 2023, and again in January 2025, when bundling Gemini added roughly 17 percent whether you wanted AI or not. Microsoft's July 2026 increase was its second broad one in four years. Per-seat pricing means both companies get a raise every time your team grows, and another one whenever they decide.
What a two-to-fifteen-person team mostly needs from those seats is addresses on its own domain: a support@ the whole team can see, a billing@ that outlives whoever set it up, a name@ for each person. The suites are selling you an office; many small teams keep paying for it because of the mail. And the newsletter still is not covered: Gmail caps outbound at roughly 2,000 recipients a day and bans mass marketing sends outright, so that is a second tool with a second bill.
What LetterDuck replaces
| What you run today | LetterDuck | |
|---|---|---|
| Mailboxes for 10 people | Google Workspace Business Starter, $70/mo annual | Included, and an address is a routing rule rather than a seat |
| Newsletter to 5,000 contacts | Mailchimp Essentials, $75/mo monthly billing | Included, at any list size |
| Shared inbox | Add-on tools or forwarding hacks | Shared by design |
| Hire number 11 | +$7 to $22/mo, forever | $0 |
| Documents, spreadsheets, video calls | Docs, Sheets, Drive and Meet included in the $70 | We ship none of it, and never will |
| Per-person storage and a private mailbox | 30 GB each, with admin controls and eDiscovery | One shared workspace, not ten private accounts |
| Under about 8 people | Cheaper per month than a $50 flat fee | Flat pricing only wins as the team grows |
| Buy it today | Sign up in minutes | Waitlist, seats open in waves |
| Total, on email and newsletter alone | $145/mo and climbing | $50/mo flat |
Four of those rows go the other way, and they are the reason plenty of teams should stay where they are. If your team lives in shared documents, the $70 is buying Docs and Drive and Meet, and the mailbox is almost a free extra. Below roughly eight people a per-seat suite is simply cheaper. And we are still onboarding from a waitlist, so this is not a switch you can make this afternoon.
LetterDuck is one workspace on your domain: a threaded shared inbox covering every address, replies sent from whichever address the thread belongs to, and a newsletter composer with a designed template. An address here is a routing rule, not a paid seat, which is why "unlimited addresses" is literal rather than alias arithmetic. The deliverability layer (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, warm-up throttling, auto-suppression, RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe) ships configured and enforced, because since November 2025 Gmail hard-rejects unauthenticated mail instead of spam-foldering it.
The math at your size
| Monthly cost at | Google Workspace | Microsoft 365 Business | LetterDuck |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 person | $7 | $7 | $50 flat |
| 5 people | $35 | $35 | $50 flat |
| 10 people | $70 | $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. Microsoft 365 Business: Business Basic at $7 per user per month on annual billing. Microsoft also sells a (no Teams) edition at $5.40 that keeps the custom-domain mailbox, which is the cheaper floor if you do not need Teams. Business Standard, which adds desktop Office, is $14. Month-to-month costs 20 percent more. LetterDuck is $50 per domain, flat, unlimited addresses and subscribers.
Read the seat rows honestly: below eight people, a bare Workspace or Microsoft 365 subscription is cheaper than we are. At five seats they cost $35 a month to our $50. The math flips at eight seats and keeps flipping: at ten you pay them $70, at fifteen $105, while the LetterDuck column does not move. Add the newsletter tool most teams bolt on (Mailchimp Essentials runs $75 a month at 5,000 contacts, monthly billing) and the flat rate wins at any headcount.
The quieter win is the hire that costs nothing. Person eleven gets an address, shows up in the inbox, and the bill stays $50. No seat purchase, no plan-tier review, no deciding whether the new part-timer really needs email.
How the inbox actually works
Inbound mail for any address on the domain arrives through a catch-all and lands in one threaded inbox, parsed and stored with the message as the source of truth. Anyone on the team can open the thread and reply from the address it was sent to, and the reply goes out with In-Reply-To and References headers so it threads correctly in the customer's mail client, not as a fresh dangling message. Your sent copy is stored alongside. Support stops being one person's Gmail tab.
Who should stay on a suite
If your team lives in Docs, Sheets, and Drive, keep Google Workspace. The suite is the product there: 30 GB to 5 TB of storage per user, Meet, and inbound spam filtering that is genuinely best in class. The same goes for Microsoft shops that need desktop Excel. LetterDuck replaces the email workspace, not the office suite. The teams that fit are the ones buying seats mostly to have addresses on the domain; LetterDuck vs Google Workspace walks that decision line by line, and Google Workspace vs Microsoft 365 referees the two suites if you are staying with one.
Setting up on a fresh domain either way? The business email setup guide covers the whole path, DNS records included.