Flat-rate email hosting is the small corner of this market where you stop paying per person. Four providers dominate it, all of them independent, and the differences between them are not the ones the review sites write about.
Everyone here has already decided that $6 a seat is the wrong shape for forty mailboxes. What's left to decide is which flavour of flat you want, because the four charge for completely different things — disk, message volume, usage, and plan tier — and that choice is what you'll live with.
Four Ways to Charge Flat
"Flat-rate email hosting" gets used as if it means one thing. It doesn't. Each of these picks a different meter and leaves the others alone, which is why a plan that's obviously right for one team is obviously wrong for the next.
| Provider | What you actually buy | Entry price | What stays uncapped |
|---|---|---|---|
| MXroute | Storage | $59/year, 10 GB | Domains, accounts |
| Migadu | Daily message volume | $19/year (Micro) | Domains, mailboxes, addresses |
| Purelymail | Usage, billed as consumed | ~$10/year for 3 GB | Domains, users |
| TrekMail | A plan tier | Free (Nano) | Nothing — counts are capped |
That last row is a concession, not a boast, and it's dealt with below.
MXroute: Flat-Rate Email Hosting Priced on Disk
Plans run from $59 a year for 10 GB up to $550 for a terabyte, with unlimited domains and accounts at every tier. The stack is conventional and complete: SMTP, IMAP, POP3, forwarding, aliases, Sieve, Roundcube, custom SpamAssassin rules, a shared pool of high-reputation IPs, and a 400-messages-per-hour cap per account. Reseller plans start at $30 a quarter for 75 GB, rising to $25 a month for 200 GB.
Two things to know before choosing it. Their CalDAV and CardDAV sync exists but, in their own documentation's words, "none of our webmail applications currently connect to or share data with it" — there's no web calendar. And their support position is stated openly: they expect you to know email basics and are there when things get complicated.
Both are honest and both are priced in. If you can read a DMARC report, this is the cheapest credible offer in flat-rate email hosting and it isn't close. Full detail in the MXroute comparison.
Migadu: Flat-Rate Email Hosting Priced on Throughput
Mailboxes, addresses and domains are unlimited on every plan. What's metered is messages per day, and that is the whole design:
| Plan | Price | Received / day | Sent / day |
|---|---|---|---|
| Micro | $19/year | 200 | 20 |
| Mini | $90/year | 1,000 | 100 |
| Standard | $290/year | 3,000 | 500 |
| Maxi | $990/year | 10,000 | 2,000 |
Storage is a soft limit rather than a hard quota, which is a genuinely humane design. The catch is that the sending numbers are lower than people expect: 20 messages a day on Micro and 100 on Mini are fine for a family or a small group and tight for a working team. Priority support is Maxi only; Mini is best-effort.
If your mailbox count is high and your volume genuinely low — a lot of role addresses that rarely send — Migadu is the best-shaped flat-rate email hosting plan on offer.
Purelymail: You're Buying Infrastructure
Roughly $10 a year for one address with 3 GB, with multiple domains and users at no extra charge. Their own framing is that you pay for infrastructure and get infrastructure, and they're unusually direct about the trade-offs, which is worth respecting.
They state plainly that obscure mail servers occasionally block them, that there's no 24/7 support, and that some users find the interface tricky at first. They also prohibit marketing mail, bulk sending, mailing lists and domain warm-up outright, with account bans and no refund for violations.
None of that is hidden in a terms page nobody reads — it's on the front of the product. For a technical individual or a small team that sends ordinary correspondence, it's the cheapest option here.
TrekMail: You're Buying the Layer Above
The concession first, because it's the one thing that matters if it's a dealbreaker. Counts are capped, not unlimited:
| Plan | Domains | Mailboxes per domain | Pooled storage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nano (free) | 10 | 10 | 5 GB |
| Starter | 50 | 100 | 15 GB |
| Pro | 100 | 300 | 50 GB |
| Agency | 1,000 | 1,000 | 200 GB |
A thousand domains at a thousand mailboxes each covers every agency we've met, but that's not the same word as unlimited, and if unlimited is the requirement then one of the three above is your answer.
What the extra money buys is the tooling around the mailbox, which is where all three of the others stop by design. The three that come up most in evaluations: reading mailboxes hosted at other providers from the same client, search that spans a whole portfolio rather than one inbox, and file storage attached to the same account.
What Flat-Rate Email Hosting Usually Leaves Out
Mailboxes you don't host. Most agencies have clients staying on Google Workspace who aren't moving. The standard workaround is forwarding, which breaks SPF alignment and gives you no way to reply as the right address. Connecting to those mailboxes over IMAP removes the workaround entirely — the account stays put and replies leave through its own provider. See the unified inbox. None of the three offers this.
Search across the portfolio. Roundcube searches the folder you're standing in, which is fine at one mailbox and useless at forty. Cross-mailbox search covers every folder in every mailbox you can reach, in one query.
Files. All three sell storage for mail. Attachments over the usual 25 MB ceiling stay your problem. Drive here is part of the same account, mounts as a network drive over WebDAV, and turns oversized attachments into revocable share links automatically.
Migration that checks itself. IMAP copying can leave a folder short and report success. A move here reconciles unique Message-IDs on both sides afterwards and tells you what's missing. See bulk migration.
Team addresses. An address several people answer wants membership, not a forwarding rule, so a colleague's reply is visible. That's a shared mailbox, and it works in Outlook and Apple Mail without a shared password.
Picking Flat-Rate Email Hosting Without Regret
Choose MXroute if you want the most accounts for the least money and you're comfortable being your own first line of support. No other flat-rate email hosting matches it on raw cost per mailbox.
Choose Migadu if you have many addresses that receive more than they send, and you like storage that bends rather than breaks. Check the daily send figure against reality first — it's the number that surprises people.
Choose Purelymail if you're technical, price-sensitive, and value a vendor that tells you its weaknesses on the front page. Read their prohibited-use list before signing up; it's stricter than most.
Choose TrekMail if you administer mailboxes for other people — clients staying on other platforms, addresses several staff answer, portfolios too large to search one inbox at a time, files you currently pay a second vendor to hold. If none of that describes you, one of the three above is cheaper and you should take it.
The Verdict, Whoever You Are
All three independents optimise for the same buyer: someone hosting their own mail, cheaply, who can run it. Here's where that fits and where it doesn't.
One person, one domain. Take one of them. Purelymail at roughly $10 a year, Migadu Micro at $19 if you send under 20 a day, MXroute at $59 if you want room. All three are good and cheaper than us; the reasons to look elsewhere are a calendar in the same window as the mail, and DNS you'd rather not apply by hand.
A team on one domain. Now it shifts. Flat-rate email hosting that meters disk or volume still leaves support@ as an alias delivering copies, so two people answer the same customer. Membership fixes that. So do per-address storage caps, two-factor on each mailbox, and delivery-time filters that behave identically in every client — none of which are on those three price lists at any tier.
Mail for other people's companies. None of the three is built for it. No DNS applied for you, no bulk domain or mailbox creation, no setup invites, no verification, no per-mailbox 2FA, no 13-language interface — and no way for a client to log into your brand instead of your supplier's. MXroute sells reseller plans, but that's wholesale capacity: the client still lands on MXroute's webmail at MXroute's hostname.
Pick by the job rather than the meter. Cheap flat-rate email hosting for your own mail: any of the three. Mail as something other people rely on you for: the one that treats that as the product.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which flat-rate email hosting is cheapest?
Purelymail for a single address at roughly $10 a year, and MXroute at scale, where $59 a year covers unlimited accounts. Migadu's Micro at $19 sits between them but caps you at 20 sent messages a day.
In flat-rate email hosting, is unlimited really unlimited?
At MXroute and Migadu the account and domain counts genuinely are; what's metered is storage and daily volume respectively. Purelymail bills usage as consumed. TrekMail caps counts by plan and says so above.
Can any of these send bulk or cold email?
No, and all of them say so. Purelymail bans marketing mail and warm-up outright, Migadu's daily send limits make it impractical, MXroute rate-limits at 400 an hour, and our own sending limits are daily and plan-based. Bulk sending belongs on a dedicated platform.
Does all flat-rate email hosting support IMAP and webmail?
Yes. Every provider here speaks plain IMAP and SMTP and ships a webmail client, which is what makes moving between them straightforward.
What about calendars?
MXroute syncs CalDAV and CardDAV but its documentation confirms the calendar does not appear in its webmail. Purelymail and Migadu do not lead with calendar features. Ours is part of the same interface as the mail and syncs over CalDAV and CardDAV.
How hard is switching between flat-rate email hosting providers?
Not very — they all speak IMAP, so a mailbox move is a standard copy. The work is in DNS cutover and getting credentials for every source mailbox, not in the copying itself.
Is flat-rate email hosting worse at deliverability?
Not inherently. All four run authenticated sending on maintained IP pools. Deliverability is mostly decided by your own domain's authentication and list hygiene rather than by the pricing model.
