Nextmail against
Forward Email
line by line.
Their list price is $3 / month, unlimited domains, checked in September 2026. Ours counts domains and sends, never people, so set the dials below to your own team and volume.
What they are better at
Cheap, 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.
Why people move
The catch is sending: 300 messages a day by default, raised only on request, with newsletters reviewed first, and there is no assistant in the mailbox. Nextmail sends from the address that receives, against a monthly allowance you can see, with the assistant and an MCP server on every plan.
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.
Forward Email hosts mail too, but it charges one flat price per account rather than per person, so the calculator above prices it and this table sticks to the per-person mailboxes.
| 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 |