Nextmail against the rest
Everyone else counts seats, emails or contacts.
We never run a meter.
Real list prices, checked in September 2026, and an honest account of what the others do better. Drag the dials: theirs move with every seat, send or contact, ours in four steps.
most mailboxes bill per seat; two or more needs Starter
ours steps at 1, 50 and 500; Proton, HEY, Resend, Fastmail, Postmark and Mailgun charge more
Sending APIs and Mailchimp bill by volume; mailboxes cap it per seat
unlimited on every plan of ours; Proton and Fastmail tie them to seats
Forward EmailTeam
FastmailBusiness Standard
Google WorkspaceBusiness Starter
SuperhumanStarter + WorkspaceMost of these sell one piece of the job: a mailbox, a sending API, a campaign tool or an app that needs a mailbox from somebody else. The Nextmail price is the whole job, with mailboxes on your own domains, sending and receiving, the full API and the AI assistant on every plan. So this is not even a fair comparison: every other bar buys one piece, and ours buys all of it.
Line by line.
Where a vendor does not document something, it says so rather than pretending the answer is no.
| Compared | Nextmail Starter | Fastmail Business Standard | Proton Mail Mail Essentials | Google Workspace Business Starter | HEY for Domains per person | Superhuman Starter + Workspace |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What you actually pay for | One plan per workspace | Each person | Each person | Each person | Each person | Each person, twice |
| Five people, every month | $20 | $30 | $39.95 | $42 | $58 | $192 |
| Twentieth person costs | $0 | $6 | $7.99 | $8.40 | $12 | $38.40 |
| Hosts the mail itself | a client on top of Gmail or Outlook | |||||
| Catch-all on your own domain | yours to switch on | paid plans | via a routing rule | aliases; catch-all not documented | whatever the host does | |
| Free on your own domain | one domain, up to 1,000 addresses | trial only | custom domains are paid | trial only | no trial on domains | trial only |
| Drafts, subjects and answers from AI | writing assistant only | Gemini | Business tier | |||
| Your own agent can work the inbox | MCP server | JMAP API | API, no MCP | |||
| End-to-end encryption | between Nextmail mailboxes | their whole point | enterprise tiers |
One at a time.
Each of these says what that rival is genuinely better at before it says anything else.
Nextmail vs Google Workspace$8.40 / person / month ($7 billed yearly)Docs, Sheets, Meet and a mail account everyone on earth already knows how to use. Deliverability nobody has to think about.vsNextmail vs Superhuman$30 / person + a mailbox ($25 billed yearly)The fastest keyboard-driven reading experience in email, and a genuinely good AI writing layer. Split-second interactions that make an old Gmail feel new.vsNextmail vs HEY$10–12 / person / monthThe strongest opinion in email: screening, the Imbox, the Feed, paper trail. If you want somebody to have decided for you, they have.vsNextmail vs Fastmail$6 / person / month ($5 billed yearly)Twenty years of reliable, fast, standards-first hosting. JMAP is the best open API in email, and their alias handling is excellent.vsNextmail vs Proton Mail$7.99 / person / month ($6.99 billed yearly)Real end-to-end encryption between Proton users, and Swiss jurisdiction. If your threat model needs zero-access mail today, this is the answer.vsNextmail vs Resend$20 / month for 50,000 sendsThe nicest developer experience in transactional email. Good docs, a clean API, React Email for the templates, and webhooks that arrive when they say they will.vsNextmail vs SendGrid$19.95 / month for 50,000 sendsThe default choice for a decade. SDKs in every language, dynamic templates, and an event webhook a whole ecosystem already knows how to read.vsNextmail vs Postmark$15 / month for 10,000 sendsDeliverability is the whole product. Transactional and broadcast mail travel on separate streams, and its activity and bounce tools are the clearest in the business.vsNextmail vs Mailgun$15 / month for 10,000 sendsBuilt for developers who want control: routes that act on inbound mail, a validation API, and sending across many domains.vsNextmail vs Amazon SES$0.10 per 1,000 sendsThe lowest price per email anywhere, with the scale of AWS behind it.vsNextmail vs Mailchimp$13 / month at 500 contactsCampaigns, audiences, landing pages and reporting that a marketing team can run without help. Decades of deliverability work behind the sending.vsNextmail vs Forward Email$3 / month, unlimited domainsCheap, open source and honest about what it is. Unlimited aliases on unlimited domains, forwarded wherever you like or kept in its own encrypted IMAP mailbox, for one flat price.