Including the four situations where free is genuinely the right answer and we will tell you to stay put.
Plenty of small businesses run on free consumer mail for years without incident. This page is not an argument that they are all wrong. It is an argument about when that stops being the right call.
| Question | Free consumer email | Business email on your domain |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | $0 | From CAD $6.00 per person per month, plus ~$20/year for the domain |
| Who owns the address | The provider | Your company |
| If an employee leaves | The account and its history leave with them | The mailbox is reassigned |
| If you change providers | Every address changes | Addresses stay the same |
| Mail authentication | Provider's, shared with everyone | Yours, configurable |
| Support if something breaks | Help articles and community forums | A named contact, by plan |
| Client and insurer perception | Reads as informal in B2B contexts | Reads as an established business |
| Admin overhead | None until something goes wrong | Setup once, then minimal |
We would rather tell you this now than have you cancel in three months.
Usually one of these five happens, and then the decision makes itself.
You spend roughly CAD $72 per person per year on something you did not yet need, and a few hours of setup. Recoverable, and you can cancel at the next renewal.
You lose a departing employee's client history, or you answer a security questionnaire badly and do not win the contract. Neither is recoverable by spending money afterwards.
That asymmetry is the entire argument, and it is why we would rather you switched a year early than a month late. It is also why we will tell you to stay put when staying put is right — a customer who cancels in ninety days costs us more than they paid.
Not automatically. The major free providers run excellent infrastructure. What changes is control and continuity: you own the domain, you configure the authentication, accounts survive departures, and access is per person with roles. Those are governance advantages more than raw security ones, and it is more honest to describe them that way.
Generally no — custom domains are a paid feature on essentially every major provider now. If you have an old grandfathered free plan with a custom domain, that is worth keeping until the provider ends it.
Typically CAD $6 to $20 per person per month depending on what is bundled with it, plus roughly $15–$25 per year for the domain itself. ClearGlass Workspace starts at CAD $6.00 per person per month with annual billing, exclusive of tax.
One account per person, yes — that is what makes offboarding and access control work. Shared addresses like info@ or accounts@ are aliases pointing at real accounts, and they do not consume a seat.
Two people is where the arguments start to bite. At one person it is mostly about how your address looks to B2B clients, which is a real reason but a weaker one.
Yes — there is a 14-day trial and no card is charged during it. Cancel before it ends and you are not charged at all.
Plans start at CAD $6.00 per person per month with annual billing. Fourteen-day trial, no card charged, cancel in one click.