Free Email Hosting: When to Stay Free and When to Upgrade
Mailbox counts, storage, send volume, and compliance triggers — signs you have outgrown the free tier, and how OquMail adds mailboxes beyond 15 in place.
OquMail's free plan covers most businesses under fifteen people. Upgrade signals: you need more than 15 mailboxes, exceed per-mailbox storage regularly, or hit daily send limits on high-volume transactional mail. OquMail is free for up to 15 mailboxes. Need more? Contact us — $1 per extra mailbox per month, added to your existing workspace.
What the free plan includes
- Up to 15 mailboxes and 3 domains per workspace
- 5 GB storage per mailbox
- 250 outbound emails per mailbox per day, shared between people and API sends
- Webmail, plus IMAP/SMTP for Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird and phones
- Transactional API, SPF/DKIM/DMARC setup and delivery logs
Signs you have outgrown it
- You need a sixteenth mailbox — contact us and we add extra mailboxes at $1 each per month
- Mailboxes regularly approach 5 GB even after clearing old attachments
- Your product needs to send well over 250 messages a day from one mailbox
- You need features email hosting does not cover, such as shared calendars or a full office suite
When staying free is the right call
If your team is under fifteen people and mostly needs reliable mail on its own domain, paying per user for a suite you do not use is not an upgrade. Review it when one of the signs above appears, not on a schedule.
Want to see how your own domain is set up? Use the free SPF checker and DMARC checker: they run in your browser and store nothing.