FounderMail vs Google Workspace

Google Workspace is the default answer to "where should our company's email live", and for a lot of companies it is still the right one. This is an honest account of where the two diverge, from people who obviously have a preference.

The pricing model is the whole story

Workspace bills per user, per month. Business Starter is €6.80/user/month at list price with 30 GB pooled per person, Standard is €13.60 with 2 TB, Plus is €21.10 with 5 TB. An annual commitment saves about 16%, and the Business tiers cap at 300 users.

We bill per account, tiered on volume. Free, $4/month Plus, $12/month Pro, $39/month Scale — with unlimited mailboxes and domains on every one of them.

The distortion this creates in a small company is familiar: you stop creating addresses. Nobody sets up invoices@ or press@ or a per-project alias when each one is another €6.80 a month, so you end up routing everything through one overloaded inbox. Removing the per-seat charge removes that decision entirely.

Where Workspace is straightforwardly better

Do not switch on price alone. Workspace wins on:

• Everything that isn't email. Docs, Sheets, Drive, Meet, shared Calendar. We host mail. If your team lives in Google Docs, we are not a replacement — we are the mail half of a stack that still includes something else.
• Admin and compliance at size. Vault, retention policies, DLP, granular org-unit controls. If you have a compliance officer, you want Workspace or Microsoft 365.
• Deliverability reputation by default. Google's outbound reputation is its own asset. Ours depends on Amazon SES and on us policing abuse, which is why new domains start reply-only.
• Being the boring choice. Genuinely worth something. Every IT contractor knows Workspace.

Where we are better

• Mail grouped by customer, not by mailbox. The dashboard rolls every message from a person into one timeline spanning every inbox in the account. Gmail cannot do this across mailboxes because it has no concept of your company's other inboxes.
• Your app's data next to the thread. Push a contact's plan, MRR and user id through our link API and it renders in the sidebar beside their mail.
• Unlimited addresses. Per-project inboxes, one-off addresses for a conference, one for every person and one for every job. Create them without a budget conversation.
• IMAP and SMTP on the free tier. No plan gates the protocols.
• A built-in importer. Your Workspace mail, folders and dates intact, copied from the dashboard. Nothing to install.

The migration question

Moving takes three steps. Add your domain and create the mailboxes; Workspace keeps receiving while you do. Open each mailbox, choose Import mail from another provider, pick Google Workspace and sign in with an app password: the importer copies the history in the background. Then switch the MX record, import once more to catch the last day, and cancel the seats. The migration guide has every step. What you cannot bring is Drive, Docs or Calendar — that is a separate decision and, for most teams, a reason to keep at least one Workspace seat.

A pattern that works well: keep one Workspace seat for the founder who needs Docs and Meet, and move the shared addresses — hello@, billing@, support@, every alias — to us. You stop paying per seat for addresses that are not people.

Short version

If you need Google's productivity suite, buy Workspace; we are not competing for that. If what you actually need is email on your domain for a team that has more addresses than people, the per-seat model is charging you for the wrong thing.

Start free — no card, and the DNS takes two minutes to undo.

Workspace pricing verified against workspace.google.com/pricing on 5 September 2026. Check it before deciding; list prices move and promotional rates expire.