Migadu Alternatives

Last spring I moved a small collective — four people, three domains, somewhere north of thirty email addresses once you counted role accounts, aliases, and the one person who insists on having first.middle.lastname@ — off a per-seat provider that had been charging them for every single address. Their new bill: $90 a year. Flat. Unlimited addresses, unlimited domains, and nobody counting heads. The provider was Migadu, a Swiss email host that prices accounts the way internet infrastructure should be priced — by consumption, not by how many humans you employ.

I've run Migadu myself since for a couple of personal domains, and I've moved a few small teams onto it since. It's one of my favourite products in this entire database and also one of the easiest to outgrow, which is a strange combination I want to explain properly. Because Migadu's model is genuinely unusual, most comparisons against it are comparing the wrong things.

What makes Migadu weird (in a good way)

Almost every business email provider on the market — Google, Microsoft, Zoho, Fastmail, all of them — charges per mailbox per month. Add a colleague, pay more. Add a role account like invoices@, pay more. That model made sense when storage was expensive and humans were the only things that sent email. Neither is true anymore.

Migadu charges per account, flat. A single Migadu account can host unlimited mailboxes, unlimited addresses and aliases, and (on all but the entry tier) unlimited domains. The limits that actually exist are throughput and storage: how much mail flows in and out per day, and how much space you use. At time of writing, the tiers run: Micro at $19 per year (around 200 inbound and 20 outbound messages per day, 5 GB of storage); Mini at $9/month or $90/year (1,000 in, 100 out, 30 GB); Standard at $29/month or $290/year (3,000 in, 500 out, 100 GB); and Maxi at $99/month or $990/year (10,000 in, 2,000 out, 500 GB). The quotas are counted across the whole account, not per mailbox.

The catch they spell out themselves on their pricing page: there is no free plan anymore (they ran one for years, then closed it as the user base grew), support is email and ticket only — no phone, no chat — and the Micro tier is deliberately hobbled, with some features unavailable and "almost unlimited" rather than unlimited domains. Also, Migadu is opinionated. It expects you to understand DNS records. Its webmail is clean and functional, built in-house, but it's not trying to be Outlook.

When it makes sense to leave Migadu

For all my affection, there are real walls here, and I've watched people hit them.

The throughput ceiling is a real ceiling

This is the big one. Migadu's per-day message limits are generous for humans and brutal for machines. If your domain sends automated email — an e-commerce store firing order confirmations and shipping updates, a SaaS product with notification emails, a mailing list with any real membership — you will hit the outbound cap. Mini's 100 messages per day sounds like a lot until a WooCommerce sale day eats it before lunch. Migadu is built for person-to-person email and light automation; anything that behaves like a mail sender rather than a mail user belongs elsewhere. I've helped a newsletter-driven publication off Migadu for exactly this reason, and there was no shame in it.

Deliverability at scale isn't their game

Related to the above: Migadu gets normal business email delivered reliably, in my experience, but if email is your product — marketing campaigns, transactional streams with serious volume — you want infrastructure designed for that, with dedicated IPs, bounce management tooling, and analytics dashboards. That's a different category, and it's where the alternatives below come in.

Support is best-effort at the bottom, and never instant

Migadu's support tiers track your plan: best-effort on Micro, office-hours on Mini and Standard, priority 24×7 on Maxi. There is no phone support on any plan. If your business runs on email and you need a human on the line at 9pm because mail isn't flowing, Migadu cannot be that. Swiss precision, Swiss pace — helpful when they reply, but they reply when they reply.

You want the whole office suite

Migadu does email. It does it well. It does not do documents, spreadsheets, video calls, shared calendars at the depth of a full suite (calendars and contacts sync via standard protocols, but there's no collaborative office layer). Teams that came for the pricing and stayed for the workflow often discover they're paying for a suite somewhere else anyway, and the two-bill picture looks less clever.

Compliance and enterprise checkboxes

If a client's procurement requires contractual SLAs, named support contacts, SOC-style certifications, or data residency guarantees backed by a large corporate entity, a small Swiss provider may fail the questionnaire regardless of how good the service is. Bureaucracy has its own logic.

You outgrew the philosophy

Sometimes you leave Migadu for the reason you'd leave a great independent coffee shop: you now need catering for 200 people. Growth into real headcount makes per-seat pricing from a suite provider cheaper than Migadu's upper tiers — around thirty or forty users, do the maths honestly against Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 and the flat-rate advantage narrows.

When you should stay

Stay if you're a domain collector, freelancer, or small team with many addresses and modest volume. This is Migadu's home turf and nothing else comes close on price. Families, clubs, sole traders with four domains and twenty aliases — you'd be mad to pay per seat anywhere else.

Stay if you're an agency hosting client email domains. Migadu explicitly allows third-party domains on one account, with grouping and per-domain management. One flat bill covering every client's email is a genuinely nice business model — just watch the aggregate throughput quotas.

Stay if you value the Swiss privacy posture. Migadu is Swiss-operated, advertises no data mining, and its business model doesn't need your data — you're the customer, not the product. For journalists, activists, privacy-minded professionals, that's worth more than a few missing features.

Stay if the price-to-freedom ratio is the point. Unlimited addresses on unlimited domains for $19–$90 a year is one of the best deals in hosting of any kind. When it fits, it fits perfectly.

Stay if you host other people's domains for free or cheap. Migadu explicitly welcomes third-party domains on one account, and the flat pricing turns client email hosting from a per-seat accounting headache into a single line item. I've seen freelancers cover six or seven client domains on a Mini plan and never think about billing again — that use case has no better home anywhere in this market.

Stay through minor annoyances. The webmail could be fancier. The admin panel is functional rather than beautiful. These are not reasons to pay five times as much for a product with worse fundamentals.

The alternatives

These cover the actual reasons people leave Migadu. Pricing is at time of writing; per-seat providers bill per user per month and I've noted the entry figures I'm confident in.

Purelymail — the flat-rate philosophy, cheaper, looser

The closest sibling in spirit: Purelymail is a small, extremely affordable email host built around fair-use rather than strict quotas — roughly $10 a year at the entry end at time of writing, with unlimited domains and addresses and no per-seat counting. It's the budget flat-rate option. The trade-off is a one-person operation feel: support is minimal and the service leans on your willingness to read documentation. If Migadu's Micro plan is too hobbled but you still want the model, this is where I look.

Fastmail — the polished independent

When customers leave Migadu wanting "the same independence, but nicer," Fastmail is my answer: an established, privacy-respecting (Australian) provider with genuinely excellent webmail and mobile apps, strong CalDAV/CardDAV support, and per-user pricing that starts at a few dollars per user per month at time of writing. You pay per seat again — that's the trade — but the product quality and support are a clear tier up from Migadu's, and the privacy stance remains respectable.

Zoho Mail — the value suite

Zoho Mail is where cost-conscious teams go when they've outgrown flat-rate but can't stomach Google or Microsoft pricing. Per-user pricing starts around $1 per user per month at time of writing for the mail-only tiers, with a generous free tier for very small teams, and it sits inside a huge business-app ecosystem if you want CRM and docs later. The honest caveat: the ecosystem is vast and sometimes rough at the edges, and support quality scales with what you pay.

Google Workspace — the default nobody gets fired for

If your team needs Docs, Meet, and shared drives alongside email, Google Workspace is the mainstream answer: per-user pricing (entry Business Starter tier in the single-digit dollars per user per month at time of writing), unmatched collaboration tooling, and deliverability that just works. You trade privacy and per-seat economics for convenience. Most growing teams end up here eventually; the question is whether you should.

Microsoft 365 — the Outlook shop

For businesses whose staff live in Outlook and Excel, Microsoft 365 (Email) delivers Exchange mailboxes plus the Office apps, at per-user pricing in the same ballpark as Google at time of writing. If your workflow is Word-Excel-Outlook, nothing else feels right. If it isn't, you're paying for a lot of suite you won't open.

Tuta (Tutanota) Business — privacy-first with a suite attached

Tuta (Tutanota) Business is the encrypted-email option for teams that want Migadu's privacy ethos with a commercial wrapper: end-to-end encryption by default, German data residency, and its own calendar and notes, at per-user pricing in the low single-digit euros at time of writing. The trade-offs: an encrypted-email ecosystem means fewer third-party integrations and no standard IMAP (its own apps and bridge tooling), which breaks some workflows.

Proton for Business — privacy with Swiss credentials and IMAP bridges

Proton for Business is the other privacy heavyweight: Swiss, encrypted, with a mature product family (mail, calendar, VPN, drive) and bridge tooling that lets desktop clients like Thunderbird connect. Per-user pricing is mid-range at time of writing. If you liked Migadu's Swiss privacy story but need a corporate-grade product and support structure, this is the upgrade path I'd recommend first.

How to switch without downtime

Email migrations are the migrations people actually lose mail in, so the golden rule is overlap: never cut the old provider before the new one is proven. I've done this with multi-domain Migadu accounts and it's pleasantly manual if you follow the order.

1. Inventory what exists. Export the list of domains, mailboxes, aliases, and forwards from the Migadu admin panel. Alias and forward mappings are the thing people forget, and they're the thing that silently breaks.

2. Create everything at the new provider first. Every mailbox, every alias, every forward. If you use catch-all addresses, configure those too. Nothing at the old end changes yet.

3. Migrate the existing mail. For live IMAP mailboxes, use an IMAP-sync tool (imapsync is the classic) to copy mail across while both sides are live. Migadu supports standard IMAP, so this is a solved problem. Run it once to copy the bulk, then again at cutover to catch stragglers.

4. Lower DNS TTLs a day ahead. Drop MX (and TXT/SPF-related) record TTLs to 300 seconds while still pointing at Migadu. This turns the cutover into a minutes-long event.

5. Switch MX records and watch. Point MX at the new provider, add their SPF/DKIM/DMARC records, and send test mail in both directions. At low TTL, most mail routes to the new provider within minutes; some senders cache records longer.

6. Keep Migadu alive for a week or two. The cheapest insurance there is. Old MX paths will deliver late mail to Migadu for a couple of days — set a forward to your new address or fetch via IMAP until flow is clean. Your flat account makes this overlap painless.

7. Update client devices and send a short note. Desktop and phone accounts, plus anyone who had your mail configured manually. Then cancel at your term boundary — Migadu's yearly Micro plan won't pro-rate, so time the switch near renewal.

How we evaluate hosting providers

At HostingSpotter we evaluate providers the way a paying customer experiences them, not the way a pricing page presents them. The headline number we lead with is always the renewal or ongoing price — the cost from your second billing cycle forward — because introductory rates are where this industry hides its real terms. Beyond price we weigh what actually determines whether a hosting or email relationship works: resource limits as they're genuinely enforced (message quotas matter more than "unlimited" adjectives), support responsiveness and channel honesty, data residency and privacy posture, and how cleanly you can get your data out if you decide to leave. We don't take money for rankings, and when we can't verify a figure we say "at time of writing" or leave it out entirely. Migadu is exactly the kind of provider this policy exists for: a great deal whose fine print — throughput caps, ticket-only support, no free tier — is the whole story.