Most business email is sold one of two ways. You either pay a monthly fee for every person who has a mailbox, or you pay one price for the whole business and add as many mailboxes as you need. On a pricing page the two models can look close. On a real invoice, a year after you signed up, they often are not.
This post works through what a 10-person team pays under each model, where the hidden seats come from, and what “unlimited mailboxes” actually means once you start using it.
The two pricing models in one sentence each
- Per user (per seat): every mailbox is a paid seat, so the bill is the seat price multiplied by the number of mailboxes.
- Per business: you pay for a plan, usually sized by storage, and every mailbox on it shares that storage. Adding a person does not change the price.
Neither model is a trick. They simply put the cost in different places. Per-user pricing charges for headcount. Per-business pricing charges for how much mail you keep.
What a 10-person team pays on a per-user plan
To keep the math simple, say a per-user service charges $6 per person a month. That is a round number for the example, not any particular provider’s price. Swap in the figure you pay today.
Ten people at $6 each is $60 a month, or $720 a year. That is the number most teams expect. The number they actually pay is usually higher, because a team of ten rarely needs exactly ten mailboxes.
Where the extra seats come from
- Shared addresses. info@, sales@, support@ and billing@ often need to be real mailboxes so several people can read and reply from them. On some per-user plans each one is another paid seat.
- People who have left. When someone leaves, you usually keep their mailbox for a while so customers who write to them still reach the business. That seat keeps billing.
- Contractors and seasonal staff. A bookkeeper who needs an address two days a month costs the same as a full-time employee.
- Service accounts. The mailbox your website, booking tool or invoicing app sends from is a seat too.
Add three shared addresses and one former employee to our team of ten, and the bill is for 14 seats. At $6 a seat that is $84 a month, or $1,008 a year, for the same ten people.
What the same team pays on a per-business plan
On a per-business plan, those 14 mailboxes cost the same as 10, and the same as 30. The only question is whether the shared storage is big enough for the mail you keep.
Unlimited business email hosting from CloudWish is priced this way, from $4.95 a month for the whole business. That entry plan comes with 10 GB of shared storage. If your team averages about 1 GB of mail per person, 10 GB covers ten people with room for the shared inboxes, which tend to stay small when people reply and file as they go.
Teams that keep a lot of large attachments can move to a bigger pool: the Professional plan has 20 GB of shared storage, and the Business plan starts at 45 GB and can grow to 20 TB. The price still does not depend on how many people you add.
| Situation | Per-user plan | Per-business plan |
|---|---|---|
| You hire one person | One more seat every month | No change |
| You add sales@ and support@ | Often two more seats | No change |
| Someone leaves and you keep their mail | The seat keeps billing | No change |
| Your team keeps years of large attachments | Usually covered by each seat’s own quota | You may need a bigger storage plan |
| You add a second domain | Depends on the provider | Included on CloudWish, as many domains as you like |
What “unlimited mailboxes” means in practice
“Unlimited” is a word that deserves a second look on any hosting page. Here is what it should mean, and what it cannot mean.
It means the mailbox count is not the limit
You can create a mailbox for every person, every shared address and every app, on every domain you own, without a new line on the bill. Aliases and forwarders work the same way: an alias lets sales@ land in one person’s inbox without a mailbox of its own, and a catch-all address catches mail sent to a mistyped name.
Storage is the real limit, and it is shared
All mailboxes draw from one storage pool. That is what keeps the price flat, and it is also the thing to manage. Heavy and light users balance out, which is usually a good thing: the person who deletes everything makes room for the person who keeps every PDF.
The flip side is that one mailbox full of large attachments uses space everyone shares. A few habits keep the pool healthy:
- Check which mailboxes are largest every few months, and archive or clean up the biggest ones.
- Share big files as links instead of attaching them again and again.
- Empty trash and spam folders on shared inboxes that nobody tends.
- Move to a larger storage plan when the pool is regularly close to full, instead of asking people to delete mail they need.
Sending still has sensible limits
Unlimited mailboxes does not mean unlimited sending. Providers limit how fast a single mailbox can send, to protect everyone’s deliverability. On CloudWish each mailbox can send up to 300 messages an hour, which is plenty for normal business mail, website contact forms and app notifications.
It also does not mean bulk email. Newsletters, cold outreach and warm-up services belong on a dedicated email marketing platform, and they are not allowed on CloudWish business email. Keeping those out is part of why your everyday mail keeps reaching inboxes.
When per-user pricing can still make sense
Per-user pricing is not always the worse deal. It can come out ahead when:
- You have very few people and each of them keeps a very large amount of mail.
- You rely on software that is only sold as part of a per-seat bundle, and you would pay for those seats anyway.
- Your headcount is fixed and you never need shared, former-staff or app mailboxes.
For most small and growing teams, none of these hold for long. The team grows, shared addresses multiply, and people come and go.
Questions to ask before you choose
- Do shared addresses like info@ and support@ count as paid seats?
- What happens to the bill when someone leaves and you keep their mailbox?
- Is storage per mailbox or shared, and how do you add more?
- How many domains and aliases are included?
- How many messages can one mailbox send an hour?
- Do all mailboxes get the same features, or are some locked to a higher tier?
- Can your website and apps send through your mailbox over SMTP?
Answer those for your own team, multiply out a year, and the right model is usually obvious.
Work out your own number
Count the mailboxes you really need today, including shared addresses, former staff and apps, then multiply by what you pay per seat. Compare that with one plan for the whole business. The calculator on our features page does the math for you.