Business Email Hosting Cost: 5, 20 or 50 Mailboxes

For 5 mailboxes, Google Workspace Starter costs €408 per year, Microsoft 365 Business Basic EEA without Teams costs €228, and ServerSpan eMail.Scale starts at €66 per year for unlimited users, subject to the entry plan’s 5 GB plan allocation. At 20 mailboxes, the suite totals rise to €1,632 and €912. At 50, they reach €4,080 and €2,280. Flat-rate hosting follows storage and domain limits rather than mailbox count, so the exact annual price above the entry allocation requires a quote.

Written by the ServerSpan Technical Team

Per-user suites and flat-rate hosting charge for different things

A per-user suite charges for each licensed person and bundles email with collaboration, identity, storage, and productivity applications. Flat-rate mail hosting charges for a shared service allocation, usually defined by total storage, domain limits, and acceptable use.

The annual formulas are straightforward:

Per-user annual cost = paid users × monthly price per user × 12.

Flat-rate annual cost = monthly plan price × 12, with an upgrade only when storage or another plan limit is exceeded.

The comparison assumes one paid suite user for each mailbox. Aliases, distribution groups, shared addresses, archived users, and resource mailboxes can follow different licensing rules. Confirm those cases with the chosen provider before approving a budget.

The annual cost gap becomes large after the first few mailboxes

The following table uses current published European prices. Google Workspace Starter is €6.80 per user per month with a one-year commitment. Microsoft 365 Business Basic EEA without Teams is €3.80 per user per month, paid yearly. ServerSpan eMail.Scale starts at €5.50 per month and does not price users individually.

Mailboxes or paid users	Google Workspace Starter	Microsoft 365 Business Basic EEA without Teams	ServerSpan eMail.Scale
5	€408/year	€228/year	From €66/year if the 5 GB entry allocation is sufficient
20	€1,632/year	€912/year	Mailbox count remains unlimited; the required storage tier needs confirmation
50	€4,080/year	€2,280/year	Mailbox count remains unlimited; 50 GB is the highest storage capacity shown publicly and the exact tier price needs confirmation

The suite totals are list-price calculations before local tax treatment, discounts, partner pricing, or optional add-ons. Microsoft and ServerSpan explicitly publish their quoted prices without VAT. Verify the final Google invoice treatment during checkout.

At the published starting price, one Google Workspace Starter user already costs more per year than the €66 ServerSpan floor. Two Microsoft EEA users cost €91.20 per year, which also exceeds that floor. This break-even rule applies only when the entry storage allocation and mail-only feature set are sufficient.

Storage determines the real flat-rate plan

Flat-rate does not mean unlimited storage. ServerSpan currently publishes a service range from 5 GB to 50 GB, with unlimited users and from five to unlimited domains. The service page presents storage as a plan-level allocation, so budget it as pooled unless the final quote states otherwise.

Estimate live mailbox use before comparing totals. Do not add the configured quota of every mailbox unless users are expected to fill it. Measure the current server or export mailbox statistics from the existing provider.

Illustrative usage	Aggregate live mail	Flat-rate planning result
5 mailboxes averaging 1 GB	5 GB	The published entry capacity may fit at the €66 annual starting price
20 mailboxes averaging 1 GB	20 GB	A higher storage tier is required; request its current price
50 mailboxes averaging 1 GB	50 GB	The deployment reaches the highest storage capacity currently shown on the service page
50 mailboxes averaging 5 GB	250 GB	The published service range is insufficient; use a larger mail platform or a custom design

Add a growth reserve for sent mail, attachments, deleted-item retention, spam quarantine, and migration overlap. A company moving 18 GB of existing mail into a 20 GB plan has no useful operating margin even though the import technically fits.

For an exact quote, provide mailbox count, current live storage, expected annual growth, number of domains, and the largest individual mailbox. ServerSpan’s flat-rate business email hosting page provides the published service range and a direct inquiry path.

Per-user suites include more than email

Google Workspace Starter includes custom-domain Gmail, 30 GB of pooled storage per user, Meet, Drive, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, and administrative controls. Microsoft 365 Business Basic EEA without Teams includes Exchange email, 1 TB of cloud storage per user, web and mobile Office applications, identity management, and additional business applications.

Those features can justify the per-seat cost when employees actively use the suite. Replacing Google Drive, shared documents, online meetings, identity management, or OneDrive with separate products may remove the apparent saving from mail-only hosting.

Choose a suite when the company wants one identity for email and collaboration, needs integrated calendars across the whole workforce, or already standardizes its work around Google or Microsoft applications. The decision is then about the productivity platform, not the inbox alone.

Flat-rate mail hosting is designed for ordinary business email

ServerSpan eMail.Scale provides custom-domain email through IMAP, POP3, SMTP, and webmail. The published service also includes SPF and DKIM configuration, forwarding, aliases, catch-all handling, anti-spam processing, and antivirus filtering.

The service is intended for normal daily correspondence and regular platform notifications. It cannot be used for newsletters, bulk delivery, or marketing campaigns. A company that sends promotional mail should use a separate email-marketing platform rather than sending through employee mailboxes.

Flat-rate hosting is a strong fit when employees need dependable inboxes on the company domain but already use other tools for documents, storage, meetings, and internal chat. It is also useful for organisations with many low-volume addresses such as billing, projects, branches, departments, or client-facing roles.

Five mailboxes are a feature decision before they are a cost decision

At five users, the annual difference is €162 against Microsoft 365 Business Basic EEA without Teams and €342 against Google Workspace Starter, using the ServerSpan starting floor. That saving is meaningful, but the collaboration applications may be worth more than the difference for a small team.

Choose flat-rate hosting when the team mainly needs email, uses desktop mail clients or webmail, and can fit current mail into the entry allocation. Choose the suite when shared documents, centralized cloud storage, integrated calendars, and account lifecycle management are part of daily work.

Twenty mailboxes make unused suite licences expensive

At twenty users, the yearly suite bill reaches €912 for Microsoft EEA without Teams or €1,632 for Google Workspace Starter. The correct question is how many employees use the bundled applications enough to justify that recurring cost.

A mixed workforce may need a mixed design. Office staff can remain on a productivity suite while warehouse, reception, project, or service accounts use a mail-only platform, provided the domain routing and administration model support the split. Do not create a split delivery design without testing address routing, aliases, spam filtering, and recovery procedures.

Fifty mailboxes require a storage and administration plan

At fifty users, the annual list-price totals reach €2,280 for Microsoft EEA without Teams and €4,080 for Google Workspace Starter. Flat-rate hosting can avoid the per-user multiplication, but the public ServerSpan service range ends at 50 GB.

Fifty active employees with multi-year mail histories can exceed 50 GB quickly. Measure the existing mail estate before assuming that the largest listed flat-rate tier will fit. Also decide who creates accounts, resets passwords, removes former employees, restores deleted mail, and reviews suspicious logins.

A productivity suite is usually the safer fit when the organisation needs formal identity lifecycle controls, large per-user storage, retention, or integrated collaboration. Flat-rate hosting remains attractive when mail volume is controlled and the business wants many addresses without a licence attached to every inbox.

Migration and administration belong in the annual cost

The subscription invoice is not the complete first-year cost. Include mailbox migration, DNS changes, device reconfiguration, user support, archive imports, and any period in which both providers run at the same time.

• Migration: large IMAP mailboxes can take hours or days to copy and verify.
• DNS: MX, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records must be prepared before cutover.
• Devices: phones and desktop clients may need new server names, ports, or passwords.
• Retention: ordinary mailbox backups are not automatically a legal archive or eDiscovery system.
• Departures: decide how former-user mail is retained and who can access it.
• Marketing mail: budget a separate sending service for newsletters and campaigns.

The ServerSpan article Hosting a Business Email: Why Free Email Breaks at Scale explains the operational difference between a personal inbox and company mail. The guide to self-hosted email architectures covers direct delivery, relay-based designs, and the management burden of running your own server. For outbound reputation work, use the separate article on email reputation management.

Verify DNS before changing the MX records

Record the existing mail configuration before migration:

dig MX example.com +short
dig TXT example.com +short
dig TXT _dmarc.example.com +short

The MX output should identify the current receiving service. The domain TXT output should include the active SPF policy, and the DMARC query should return the current policy if one exists. Save the results with a timestamp and compare them after cutover.

Do not delete the previous service immediately after changing MX records. Keep it available during the agreed overlap period, verify inbound and outbound delivery, test password resets from important external services, and confirm that SPF and DKIM align with the visible From domain.

Choose by applications first, then compare the mailbox bill

Choose Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 when the bundled applications, cloud storage, identity controls, and collaboration workflows are part of the requirement. Paying per user is reasonable when each person receives a full working environment rather than an inbox alone.

Choose flat-rate mail hosting when the requirement is custom-domain email through standard protocols, the team already has its productivity tools, and aggregate storage fits the available plan range. The cost advantage grows with the number of low-volume mailboxes.

ServerSpan’s business email hosting starts at €5.50 per month with unlimited users and pooled storage from 5 GB to 50 GB. Request the storage-tier price using your current mailbox statistics rather than estimating from employee count alone.