Zoho Mail

What's the appeal? Price, first of all. Email on your own domain for $1 a person a month.

So your address ends in @yourbakery.com, not @gmail.com. It looks more grown-up on an invoice, and Google charges $7 a person for the same trick.

There are no ads. Zoho's pricing page promises it'll never show you any, or sell your data.

It's more than an inbox, too. A calendar, tasks, notes and bookmarks sit in the same window. And Streams lets your team comment on an email the way you would on a social post, which beats forwarding it round with "thoughts?" on top.

Switching over isn't scary. A free tool copies your mail, contacts and calendars across from Google Workspace or Microsoft 365.

And you can ring someone. Paid plans get support by phone, chat and email round the clock. One App Store reviewer was pleased just to reach an actual human.

It's business email, so there's homework. You need a domain, and you have to point it at Zoho before anything arrives. Zoho walks you through it, but Gmail it isn't.

The free plan has a catch as well. No IMAP or POP, which means you can't read it in Apple Mail, Outlook or Thunderbird. It's Zoho's website and Zoho's apps only. And it's only offered in some data centres, so you may not be able to get it at all.

The phone app has rough patches. One long-time fan cut their review to two stars in August 2025 after the delete button started playing up. Others mention notifications for emails they then couldn't find.

It can feel like a lot. One reviewer called it exhausting, with settings split between the inbox and a separate admin screen.

And the cheap plans are yearly only. Mail Lite and Mail Premium have no monthly option.

Start with the free plan if you can get it. That's up to 5 people on one domain, with 5 GB each.

Mail Lite is $1 a person a month, billed yearly. You get 5 GB each, or 10 GB for $1.25. For a two-person business that's $24 a year, all in.

Want documents, chat and video calls too? Workplace Standard is $3 a person on yearly billing, or $4 month to month. Each person gets 30 GB of mail, and it's the plan Zoho itself labels best value.

Mail Premium is $4 a person, yearly only, with 50 GB and the legal bits like retention and S/MIME. We'd skip it unless a lawyer or an auditor has asked for those.

Not sure? You can try the top plan free for 15 days without a card.

Paying yearly on the Workplace plans saves about 20%. Non-profits can ask Zoho's sales team for a special price.

Zoho Mail has 4.6 on the App Store from about 8,000 ratings. Four in five are five stars, but there are around 500 one-star reviews in there too.

Who's happy? Small business owners, mostly, and price is why they came. One had paid Yahoo over $20 a month for years, moved across and wished they'd done it sooner.

On Hacker News it's the cheap, sensible answer whenever someone wants out of Gmail. One commenter pays about 19 Canadian dollars a year for 10 GB on their own domain and is delighted with it.

The unhappy ones are mostly on about the app. Emails that don't show up after the notification. A calendar that sent one reviewer wrong meeting updates. A delete button that stopped behaving.

Support gets both kinds of review. Some got a quick answer from a real person. Others found it slow, or got what read like a stock reply.

So the service gets more love than the app, as far as we can tell.