Business email is the service that stores and delivers email for your company domain. Instead of sending from a personal Gmail, your team sends and receives from addresses like you [at] yourcompany [dot] com — and an admin controls who has access.
If you are evaluating options for your team, here is what you need to know.
What Business Email Includes
A basic business email plan should cover:
- Custom domain email — You bring a domain you own, and the provider hosts mailboxes under it.
- DKIM, SPF, and DMARC — Authentication records that improve deliverability and prevent your domain from being spoofed. Good providers set these up automatically.
- Admin controls — The ability to create, modify, and deprovision mailboxes from a single dashboard. When someone leaves, you can archive or reassign their mailbox instantly.
- Reliable delivery — Proper infrastructure that gets your email to inboxes, not spam folders.
How Pricing Works
Business email is typically priced in one of two ways:
Per user: You pay a flat rate for every person in your workspace, regardless of whether they have an email address. Google Workspace ($7/user/month) and Microsoft 365 ($6–$22/user/month) use this model. The problem is that you end up paying for email seats you never use.
Per mailbox: You only pay for the email addresses you actually provision. This is more efficient for teams where not everyone needs a work email address — for example, a 10-person team where only 4 members correspond with clients externally.
NoHeck uses per-mailbox pricing at $4/mailbox/month, added to a base workspace plan (free for small teams). This means a 10-person team with 4 external email addresses pays $16/month for email — not $70.
What to Watch Out For
Bundled apps you don't need. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 bundle productivity suites (Docs, Sheets, Meet, Calendar) into every plan. If your team already has tools for these, you are paying for software you do not use.
Separate chat tools. Most email providers do not include team messaging. You end up adding Slack or Teams on top, which means more cost and more context switching — the exact problem work email was supposed to solve.
Setup complexity. DNS records (MX, DKIM, SPF) need to be configured correctly for email to work reliably. Providers that make this manual are a liability.
A Simpler Alternative
NoHeck was built specifically to avoid these problems. Work email is an add-on to a workspace that already includes team messaging and project boards. You set up DNS records with a guided wizard, DKIM is configured automatically, and you only pay for the mailboxes you provision.