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FranklyMail
Comparison

FranklyMail vs Google Workspace

Five people on Google Workspace Business Starter costs $420 a year. The same five people on FranklyMail cost $9.

Almost none of that $411 is email quality. It is Docs, Sheets, Meet, Drive, and an admin console — and if you replaced those with Notion, Slack and Figma years ago, you are renting a mail server at office-suite prices.

If you still live in Drive, stay. This page is for everyone who does not.

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Side by side.

A year of email for you and four others. List prices, read off each provider’s own page on 12 August 2026.

FranklyMail vs Google Workspace: annual cost and features for 5 people.
Per year, 5 peopleFranklyMailGoogle Workspace
Price per year, 5 people$9$420
Pricing modelFlat, plus storage you use$7 per user, per month, on an annual term
People includedUnlimitedEvery one of them billed
Custom domainsUnlimitedSecondary domains allowed, seats still billed per person
Storage10 GB pooled, then $0.40/GB/yr30 GB per user, not poolable down
IMAP, POP3, SMTPYesYes
JMAPYesNo
Sieve filtersYesNo
Docs, Sheets, Meet, DriveNoYes
SSO / SAML, retention holds, audit logNoYes
“Contact sales” anywhereNeverOn Enterprise

Where the $411 goes

Workspace is not overpriced. It is priced as an office suite, because that is what it is — mail, calendar, video, documents, storage and administration sold as one seat. The seat is good value if you use the seat.

The problem is that a lot of small teams buy the whole suite and use one twelfth of it. The documents moved to Notion. The calls moved to Slack huddles or Zoom. The files moved to Drive-shaped holes in Dropbox, Figma and GitHub. What is left running on that $7 a month is Gmail with your domain in the From line.

Priced on its own, that is a mail server, storage, and a spam filter. Five of them, for a year, is $9 here. The rest of the invoice is buying software you already replaced.

Where per-seat pricing stops making sense

Per-seat pricing assumes every seat is a person doing a comparable amount of work. Email does not behave that way. A partner who sends forty messages a day and a bookkeeper who reads four a week cost a mail server almost the same, which is to say: almost nothing. Storage and bandwidth are the real costs, and they are small.

So the seat price is not measuring anything about email. It is measuring your headcount, and it bills you for growth that costs your provider nothing. Add a co-founder to Workspace and the invoice goes up $84 a year. Add one here and it goes up nothing, because the thing that actually costs money is the storage they use, and you are already paying for that.

To be fair about a detail people get wrong: Workspace does not charge for aliases. An info@ or a hello@ is free there, same as here. The per-seat charge is for humans with their own mailbox — which is exactly the number that grows when you hire.

What moving actually involves

Nothing breaks while you set up. You add your domain here, paste four DNS records — MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC — and Workspace keeps delivering your mail the entire time, because mail follows the MX record and yours has not moved yet. When the records read green, you flip MX. That is the switch.

Your archive comes with you because it always could: Gmail speaks IMAP, and Google Takeout will hand you an mbox of everything. Point a mail client at both accounts and drag, or run a sync tool. The archive was never Google’s to keep.

What you cannot bring is the parts that are not email. Calendar, Docs, Drive and Meet stay behind, because we do not build those and are not going to. That is the trade, stated plainly rather than buried in a feature table.

What Google Workspace does better.

Every comparison page on the internet skips this section. Here is ours.

  • Spam filtering. Google sees more mail than anyone alive and it shows. We are not going to claim parity with that.
  • The apps. Gmail on Android, the web client, the search — all better than a standards-based webmail, and it is not close.
  • Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Meet and Drive, working together, in one bill.
  • Administration at real scale: SSO and SAML, retention holds, an audit log, device management, a support contract with a name on it.
  • Nobody is second-guessed for choosing Google. That is worth something, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

Stay on Google Workspace if…

  • Drive is your filesystem and Docs is where your company writes things down.
  • You need SSO, SAML, retention holds or an audit trail — for a client, an auditor, or a regulator.
  • Someone other than you administers it, and the handover cost is real.
  • You want one vendor, one invoice and one support number for mail, calendar and video.

Come to us if…

  • Workspace is, honestly, just Gmail with your domain on it.
  • You are paying full seats for people who read four messages a week.
  • You want mailboxes for a family, a side project or a small studio without doing headcount maths first.
  • You want your address list to grow without your invoice growing.

Fair questions.

Is your spam filtering as good as Gmail’s?
Frankly, no. Nobody’s is. We do the standards properly — SPF, DKIM and DMARC checks, server-side Sieve rules you control — and we keep our sending IPs clean by refusing bulk mail outright. That is a real answer to spam, but it is not Google’s answer, and you should know that before you move.
Do I lose Google Calendar?
Yes. We do email and nothing else — no calendar, no drive, no documents. That refusal is why the price is $9 and why the deliverability stays boring. Most people who leave Workspace keep a free Google account for the calendar and never think about it again.
Can I keep my old mail?
All of it. Gmail speaks IMAP and Takeout exports an mbox, so the archive copies across in a mail client. There is nothing to unlock and nobody to ask.
What about the 30 GB per user I get from Google?
Ours is 10 GB pooled across everybody, then $0.40 per GB per year. For five ordinary inboxes that is usually plenty and usually cheaper. For five people who never delete an attachment, do the sum before you move — 100 GB here is $36 a year on top of the $9, which is still under a tenth of Workspace, but it is not free and we are not going to imply it is.

Other comparisons

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