Free business email on your domain

Start with the part that is never free. Registering yourcompany.com costs $10 to $15 a year, and the registry that operates the ending takes most of it. No email provider, registrar or web host can make that go away. They can pay year one for you and recover it in the renewal, or they can give you a subdomain of their own name, which is free because it is theirs, not yours.

Everything after the domain can be free. The question is what kind.

Forwarding takes mail sent to hello@yourcompany.com and delivers it to an inbox you already have. There is no mailbox to store, so there is nothing to charge for, and several companies offer it at no cost. Registrars such as Cloudflare, Namecheap and Porkbun forward a handful of addresses while you keep DNS with them. Faivelo forwards unlimited addresses on your domain, plus a catch-all for anything unassigned, for nothing and without an end date.

The limit is sending. Forwarding gets mail to you; it does not let you reply from the business address, and replying from your personal one is where the professional effect leaks away. For a side project or a landing page waiting for its first customer, forwarding is exactly enough.

Most pages advertising free business email mean a real, hosted mailbox that is free for a fixed period and paid after. That is fine as long as the page says so. Google Workspace gives fourteen days with a card on file. Microsoft 365 gives a month with a card that converts automatically when it ends. Faivelo gives fourteen days of the full Growth plan with no card at all, so nothing converts unless you choose it, and the paid plan after is a flat $6 a month for unlimited mailboxes.

Read one line before you start any trial: what happens on the last day. If the answer involves a card you already handed over, put a reminder in your calendar now.

A few providers run a genuinely free tier of real mailboxes. Zoho Mail's Forever Free plan gives up to five mailboxes on one domain with 5 GB each. The ceiling is the catch: app and web access only, no IMAP, so your usual mail app cannot connect, and the sixth person pays. For a very small business that lives in the browser it works, and it is honest.

The fourth kind of free is the one to walk past: a free mailbox bundled with a web hosting plan, on a shared server, with DKIM unset and a reputation shared with every other site on the machine. It is free in the sense that you have already paid for it, and it is the most common reason a small company's mail goes to spam.