The economics of many domains on one server

Mail is priced per person almost everywhere, because for most buyers a mailbox and a person are the same thing. If you have eight domains and nine addresses between them, that model prices you as though you were nine people, and you are one.

Where the model breaks

Count the addresses you actually have. Not staff — addresses. A developer with side projects has hello@ on each of eight domains. An agency has one per client. A small business has five people and fifteen role addresses. In each case the number of mailboxes is several times the number of humans, and per-seat pricing charges for the former while claiming to price the latter.

The usual workaround is aliases: one paid mailbox, twelve addresses forwarding into it. That works until somebody needs to send as one of them, or until two people need to see the same inbox, and then you are back to paying.

The other side of the sum

Self-hosting is not free, and any comparison that pretends otherwise is selling something.

• The server. A 2 GiB VPS, so roughly $6 a month, or $72 a year.
• Your time. This is the term everybody omits. Call it two hours a month at whatever your hour is worth. At $50 that is $1,200 a year — larger than any licence in this market, ours included.
• The licence, if you buy one rather than running something free.

That middle term is why the honest answer at ten mailboxes is often “keep paying the hosted suite”. Ten seats at $84 is $840 a year; a server plus two hours a month is more than that before any licence at all. The calculator on our pricing page includes it for exactly this reason, and it will tell you the suite wins if the suite wins.

Where it turns over is roughly where the mailbox count leaves the human count behind — twenty-five addresses, forty, a hundred — because the per-seat side keeps growing and your side does not. A server carrying a hundred mailboxes costs the same to operate as one carrying twenty.

The part that is not about money

Two things do not show up in either column.

Where the data is. Some organisations have a real answer to that question and some do not. If yours does, it is not a line item, it is a constraint.

What happens when you stop paying. With a hosted suite, access stops. That is the deal, and it is reasonable. It is also worth knowing that it is a deal you have made. We took the opposite position deliberately: a lapsed MailDock licence switches off extras in stages after a 30-day grace and cannot stop the mail you receive — delivery, IMAP and webmail keep running, because software that holds the mail you receive hostage over a billing failure is software you were right not to trust.

The shape we chose

One licence, one server, per year. A tier caps how many mailboxes and domains that server carries; inside the cap, adding either costs nothing. The prices are on the pricing page and the reasoning behind them is not a secret: we anchored on the commercial self-hosted mail market, not on per-seat SaaS, because a licence buys software and a suite buys software and an operator.