Zoho Mail pricing explained

The free plan gives one domain, up to five users and 5 GB each, which is more than any other large provider offers for nothing. The line underneath it is the one to read twice: IMAP, POP and ActiveSync are not included. In practice that means the free plan is webmail and Zoho's own apps only. Apple Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird and the stock mail app on a phone cannot connect to it, because they all speak IMAP.

For a solo owner who is happy in a browser or in Zoho's app, that is a workable deal. For anyone who wants their business mail in the same app as everything else, it is the thing that pushes them to a paid plan, which is of course the point. The second condition, "available only in select data centers", means the free plan is not offered in every region; the signup flow tells you.

The free plan also has no monthly fee to forget about, which is its own kind of risk: nobody is reminding you that a business address is running on a plan with no support obligation. Zoho has kept it running for years, so this is a note rather than a warning.

Mail Lite at $1 per user a month is the plan most small businesses actually buy. It adds IMAP, POP and ActiveSync, so every mail app works, and the paid-plan features Zoho lists across the board: a migration tool, email and domain aliases, forwarding, an integrated calendar. Storage is 5 GB per user, or 10 GB for $1.25. Both are billed yearly only; there is no monthly Lite plan, so a five-person team pays $60 upfront for the year.

Mail Premium at $4 is the compliance tier: 50 GB of mail plus 50 GB of retention storage per user, S/MIME, retention rules and eDiscovery, and a 40 MB attachment limit against Lite's 30 MB. If nobody has asked you for retention or S/MIME, you do not need it.

Workplace plans bundle Zoho's office apps (WorkDrive, Writer, Sheet, Cliq) with the mailbox and are the only ones with a monthly option. Workplace Standard is $3 yearly or $4 monthly, which makes it the cheapest way to get Zoho mail without committing to a year.

Be fair to Zoho: for one to five people on Mail Lite, nothing paid is cheaper. Five users is $5 a month. A flat-rate host like Faivelo is $6 a month for unlimited mailboxes, so at five people Zoho wins by a dollar, and at one person it wins by five.

The lines cross at six. Six Zoho Lite users cost $6 a month, the same as Faivelo Starter, and from there every extra address on Zoho costs another dollar while the flat plan stays where it is. Ten people: $10 against $6. Twenty: $20 against $6. Add the role addresses a business accumulates (info@, billing@, support@) and the crossover arrives sooner, unless you set those up as aliases, which Zoho lets you do.

Storage is the other crossover. Zoho Lite is 5 GB per person, and a mailbox that has been in use for three years is often bigger than that. Faivelo pools 10 GB across the account on Starter and 200 GB on Growth ($12), so one heavy inbox can take what a light one does not use. On Zoho the answer is the 10 GB Lite tier or Premium.

The Faivelo vs Zoho Mail page lines the two up feature by feature, including the things Zoho has that we do not, like the office suite and per-user admin controls from a mature platform.

Zoho's paid plans include a migration tool, so moving in from another host is covered. Moving out is standard IMAP: any provider's migration tool, Faivelo's included, can read a Zoho mailbox with an app-specific password and copy every folder while Zoho keeps receiving. Switch the MX records when the copy finishes. Nothing is lost at the Zoho end; it is a read, not a move.