A small professional firm needs four email tools, and you already own one of them. A mail platform on a tier that holds and searches old mail. One arrangement for the addresses more than one person answers. Something that decides what to read first. And one channel for the documents that go outside email. That’s the whole list. Firms end up with seven because each layer is sold as though the one below it were empty.
- The tier is the expensive decision, and the platform is the easy one. On both Microsoft and Google, retention, holds and the ability to search and export old mail come with an upper tier, so you buy them by moving up a rung.
- A shared inbox comes free inside what you already pay for. At six people, the paid version costs more per month than the entire mail platform. The shape of your inbound is what decides between them.
- Your mail platform is not a backup. Permanently deleted mail comes back for 14 days on Microsoft by default and for 55 days on Google. After that it’s gone for good.
- Every tool is a per-seat charge. It’s also an account for each person, a name on the next client security questionnaire, and something to close when somebody leaves. Count the last three before you count the first.
Price the tier, not the platform
Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace is usually settled before anyone asks, by whatever the rest of the practice runs on. That’s fine. It’s a real decision, and it’s rarely a close one. Both clear the bar.
The tier inside that choice is the one worth your attention. It usually gets picked by whoever set the account up, with one eye on the monthly total.
On Microsoft, the ladder for a business of up to 300 people has three rungs. Microsoft’s 2026 packaging update puts Business Basic at $7.00 per user per month, Business Standard at $14.00, and Business Premium at $22.00. Those prices take effect July 1, 2026, and existing customers stay “on current pricing until renewal” (Microsoft licensing news, checked September 6, 2026). Business Basic gives you “Web and mobile versions” of the Office apps rather than desktop ones (Microsoft 365 business plan comparison, checked September 6, 2026). That suits plenty of firms. It’s an unwelcome discovery for a firm that lives in Excel.
On Google, the three business tiers differ most visibly in storage. Business Starter pools 30 GB per person. Business Standard gives 2 TB, and Business Plus gives 5 TB (Google Workspace pricing, checked September 6, 2026). Thirty gigabytes sounds generous. It’s pooled across mail, files and photos, and a professional firm’s mailbox collects attachments for as long as the firm exists.
That’s the visible difference. Here’s the one that matters.
Holding and searching old mail is a tier, on both platforms. Microsoft’s own service description sells Exchange Online Archiving “as an add-on” for Microsoft 365 Business Basic and Business Standard. Business Premium is among the plans that “already include archiving and don’t require Exchange Online Archiving as an add-on.” The footnote says what the add-on buys: it “adds auto-expanding archiving and In-Place Hold and Litigation Hold” (Exchange Online Archiving service description, checked September 6, 2026).
Google draws the same line one rung higher. Vault lets an organization “retain, hold, search, and export users’ Google Workspace data.” It’s included in Business Plus, the Enterprise editions, Frontline Standard and Plus, Enterprise Essentials and the Education editions (Google Vault overview, checked September 6, 2026). Business Starter and Business Standard sit below that line.
So the cheapest tier on either platform gives you mail and stops there. A retention mechanism, a hold, and a way to search and export what a departing employee’s mailbox held all start a rung up. Whether your firm wants them is a question about your obligations rather than about software. What are you required to keep, and for how long? The answer is different in every practice. The accountants’ setup works through the retention number a tax practice has to write down, and the coaches’ version reaches the opposite conclusion for good reasons. Whichever it is for you, the tier is where you buy the ability to honor it. Moving up a tier later is easy. The mail you let go stays gone.
The practical version is short. If your firm has a retention obligation it can state in years, price Business Premium or Business Plus and stop comparing the cheaper rungs. Same if a client dispute would turn on correspondence. Otherwise the middle tier is usually right, and Basic or Starter suits a business smaller than the one this article is about.
The addresses more than one person answers
Every firm past two people has at least one address that belongs to the firm instead of a person: info@, billing@, documents@, the one on the website form. Three mechanisms sit behind those addresses, and the differences bite hardest where the traffic is sensitive. So the accountants’ setup works through the alias, the shared mailbox, and what each one can send and what it can’t. Take the conclusion with you and read the rest there.
The question for a tools article is the next one. When do you stop using the mechanism you already own and buy a layer?
What you already own is more capable than most firms discover. A Microsoft 365 shared mailbox is free and needs no license. On Google, a Groups collaborative inbox turns a group address into a small queue. The help page says “You can assign responsibility for a conversation to yourself or another group member,” and a member can mark a conversation complete, duplicate, or needing no action (Google Groups help, checked September 6, 2026). Assignment, resolution states and a search by assignee cover most of what a firm of six wants from a shared inbox. It’s already included.
What you’d be buying is a help desk. Front lists Starter at “$25/seat/mo, up to 10 seats” and Professional at “$65/seat/mo, up to 50 seats,” billed annually (Front pricing, checked September 6, 2026). Help Scout has a free plan covering 5 users and 1 inbox, then Standard at “$25 per user/month” (Help Scout pricing, checked September 6, 2026). Those are per-person charges, on top of the mail platform, for everyone who answers.
Run the arithmetic before the demo. Six people on Microsoft 365 Business Premium is $132 a month. Six seats of Front Starter is $150 a month. So the shared inbox layer costs more than the mail itself, and that price tells you what kind of product it is. You’re buying queue management, assignment rules, response-time reporting and a workflow built for a support team.
That’s a real thing to want, and some firms genuinely want it. A bookkeeping practice running client support at volume. A benefits administrator. A managed service where the inbound is tickets rather than relationships. Buy the desk, and feel fine about it. The test is whether you could name what a good week looks like as a number. If you’d measure first response time and it would mean something, you’re running a queue.
Most professional firms are running something else. Their inbound is thirty messages a day from people who chose them. The answer is a partner’s judgment, and the measure is whether the right person saw it. For that shape, the free mechanism plus one convention beats the purchased one, because the purchased one changes what the client sees. Ticket numbers, canned replies and a queue voice come with a help desk, and in a relationship practice they read as a firm that got bigger and worse. What Front is now built for is worth reading if it’s on your list, because the category has moved.
Two failure modes deserve naming, since they’re what actually pushes firms to buy. Two people answer the same message and one of them contradicts the other. Or a message sits for four days because everyone assumed somebody else had it. Both are ownership problems rather than tooling ones, and naming a person per address per week fixes them for nothing. If it survives that, buy the layer. For how much of one person’s inbox the other person genuinely has to be able to reach, there’s covering for each other.
The layer that decides what you read first
This is the layer that pays for itself. It’s also the one most firms buy last.
Everything above organizes mail. This layer reads it. A firm of eight partners and staff gets a few hundred messages a day between them. Perhaps twenty need somebody today. Finding those twenty is hand work, done several times a day, by the most expensive people in the building.
The category has three shapes, and telling them apart matters more than the price difference between them. One is the filter that sorts your mail into buckets by sender behavior. One is the fast client that makes handling mail quicker and leaves the deciding to you. And one is the client that weighs each message and reorders your day around the answer. What an AI email client is sorts the category properly. The test to apply in a demo is in how to tell real triage from a relabeled filter. The price band is in what these cost in 2026, which is the one number this section leaves alone.
Two things about this layer belong to a stack article rather than a category one.
The first is a compatibility question worth asking in the first five minutes. Does it sit on the mailbox you already pay for, or does it want to be the mailbox? If a product replaces your mail platform, everything in the first section gets decided again. You land somewhere with different retention, a different archive, and a different answer for a client’s security questionnaire. A layer that signs in to Gmail or Microsoft 365 inherits your tier decision instead of overriding it, which is the arrangement you want at this size.
The second is the overlap that quietly doubles a bill. This layer and the shared inbox layer both want to be the thing your team looks at all day, and both claim the shared addresses. Buy a help desk and then an assistance layer, in either order, and you’re paying two per-seat charges for one place to look. Pick one as the surface and let the other be a mechanism. Or pick one and skip the other.
Scheduling, sending files, and the ones to leave alone
Three smaller categories round out an email stack, and each has a clear answer at this size.
Scheduling. A booking tool earns its place when arranging time is a real cost. For a professional firm that usually means clients book you directly, or a meeting needs four calendars reconciled. Calendly’s free plan allows one event type, Standard is “$10/seat/mo” and Teams is $16 (Calendly pricing, checked September 6, 2026). That’s the cheapest layer in this article, and the one with the clearest before and after. Two cautions. It’s a per-seat charge, so buy it for the people who actually get booked rather than for the firm. And if your assistance layer already handles scheduling, this is a duplicate seat. What a booking link should do, and the situations where sending one reads badly, is worked through here.
The channel for documents that go outside email. Every professional practice needs one, and in most firms it lives outside the email stack. It’s a client portal that came with practice management, a secure file transfer service, or an e-signature product that also delivers documents. Buy exactly one and make sure everybody knows which. The usual failure is a firm with three, where staff pick by mood. The rule about what crosses into that channel, and why the password travels a third way, is in the accountants’ setup.
The ones to leave alone. A standalone email archiving product is redundant once you’ve bought the tier that already archives, and it’s the most common duplicate purchase in this category. Signature management is a solved problem at six people and a real product at six hundred. A marketing platform becomes an email tool the day your firm has a list. If you do send to one, it belongs on a separate sending domain for reasons the coaches’ setup explains, and that’s a different purchase with a different owner.
Your mail platform is not a backup
This is the assumption worth testing. A firm that holds it is one bad afternoon away from finding out.
On Microsoft, an item a user permanently deletes “is moved to a folder (Recoverable Items > Deletions) and kept there for 14 days, by default. You can change how long items are kept, up to a maximum of 30 days” (Exchange Online documentation, checked September 6, 2026). The same page names the one thing that changes the answer: “If you place a mailbox on litigation hold, the retention limit is ignored.”
On Google, the window is longer and ends just as hard. Mail sits in Trash for 30 days. After that, administrators “have an additional 25 days to restore messages.” Then “messages are permanently deleted from your Google Workspace account and can’t be restored by an admin or by Google” (Google Workspace admin help, checked September 6, 2026). The same page names the exception, and it’s the tier again. An organization using Vault “might be able to retrieve deleted messages beyond the additional 25-day period” where the data was under retention rules or a hold.
Fourteen days is a short window to notice something. The scenarios are ordinary. A departing employee tidies up on the way out. A compromised mailbox runs a rule that quietly deletes the replies. A retention policy lands on the wrong group. A partner clears space in a hurry. In each of those, the discovery comes weeks later, when somebody goes looking for a thread.
Three different products answer three different fears, and firms routinely buy the wrong one.
- A hold freezes everything in a named mailbox, including what the person using it tries to remove. That’s what you want when a dispute is live or foreseeable. It comes with the tier.
- A retention policy keeps mail for a stated number of years and then removes it, whether anyone remembers or not. That’s what you want to satisfy an obligation, and to let go of the rest on schedule. It comes with the same tier.
- A backup is a separate copy, held somewhere outside your mail platform. That’s what you want if your fear is losing the platform account itself, or being locked out of it. Most small firms can skip this one. The hold and the retention policy cover the failures that actually happen, and a third copy means another vendor, another export, another set of credentials and another line on the questionnaire.
If your firm hands people accounts on somebody else’s tenant, or works inside a client’s, there’s a different clock to know about. It’s shorter than either of these. The consultants’ setup has it.
What the stack actually costs a six-person firm
Per-seat pricing hides the total, so here it is once. Take a six-person firm, all figures per month, using the published numbers above.
The mail platform at the tier that includes archiving and hold is $132 on Microsoft 365 Business Premium. Two people who get booked by clients, on Calendly Standard, is $20. A file channel usually sits inside practice management already, so call it nothing new. That’s $152 a month for a complete, defensible email setup, and it’s roughly the floor.
Now the two optional layers. A shared inbox tool at $25 a seat, for the four people who answer the general address, is $100. An assistance layer is a per-seat charge in its own band, and the cost guide sets that band out properly rather than guessing at it here. Buy both and the optional half of the stack costs more than the mandatory half.
That’s the shape of the decision, and it’s why the answer for most firms is one optional layer rather than two. It’s also why the order matters, which is the last section.
Two costs stay off every invoice and are worth pricing anyway. The first is administration. Every tool is an account per person to create. It’s an enrollment in multi-factor authentication, a set of permissions to review, and something to close on somebody’s last day. A firm with no IT person carries about four of those well and about seven badly. The second is renewal timing. Microsoft’s July 2026 increase left existing customers on their old pricing until renewal, and that’s the kind of detail that belongs in a calendar entry.
Six questions that settle any of these
At this size, the buying criteria are these rather than the feature list.
Does it sit on the mailbox, or replace it? A layer that signs in to what you already run inherits your domain, your addresses, your archive and your tier. One that replaces the mailbox means a migration now, and a second place to search forever.
What leaves with you? Anything that becomes the record of a client conversation needs an export you have actually run once yourself. People skip this question at signup and regret it at renewal. It’s worth asking of the assistance layer too, and what happens if you stop is a fair thing to establish before you start.
How many accounts does it add? Dollars are the easy number, so count the accounts. Six people times four tools is twenty-four accounts to open, secure and close. The one nobody closes is the one that shows up in an incident.
Who answers for it on a questionnaire? Every product that touches client mail is a service provider you’ve added, and a client in a regulated industry will eventually ask you to name it. The consultants’ setup explains why the questionnaire arrives at all. And the questions to put in writing first is the list to work through before you connect anything to a mailbox with client material in it.
What breaks when one person is out? A tool only one person can administer is the same single point of failure as a mailbox only one person can open. Two administrators, always, even in a firm of three.
Does the client notice? New addresses, ticket numbers, do-not-reply footers and a different sending domain are all things you’re asking clients to absorb. Some are worth it. Each one costs something.
The order to buy in
If you’re building this from scratch, or cleaning up a stack that grew by accident, this is the sequence that wastes the least.
- Fix the tier. It’s the one item on this list that’s cheaper to decide now than later, because the mail you let go stays gone. Everything else can be added on a Tuesday.
- Answer the shared addresses with what you own, and give each one a named person rather than a rule. Free, immediate, and it tells you whether you have a tooling problem or an ownership one.
- Add the layer that decides what to read first. Of everything you can buy, it’s the one that removes work rather than adding a place to look, which is why it earns its seat at six people as readily as at sixty.
- Add scheduling if arranging time is visibly costing you, for the people it costs.
- Buy the shared inbox tool only when the free mechanism has failed in a way you can describe. Name the week it started and what went wrong. If you can name the week, buy the tool. Otherwise the problem is somewhere else, and the tool will leave it there.
- Check the whole list at each renewal, which is also the moment to notice that two products have grown into each other.
None of this is legal or compliance advice, and a firm with a specific obligation should read this list against that obligation.
Which layer Point is
Point is the third layer, the one that decides what to read first. That’s most of what you need in order to place Point against everything above.
Point is an AI email client that signs in to the Gmail or Microsoft 365 account your firm already runs. Your domain, your addresses and your archive stay where they are. So does your tier decision, which means the hold and the retention policy you bought still cover the mail Point is reading. You keep the address you have, your clients see what they saw last week, and there’s no migration to run.
What changes is the order of the list when you open it. Point scores every message before you see it, on two axes: what it’s worth, and what it costs to be late on. So the client waiting on an answer sits above the software renewal, and the reasoning behind that scoring is its own guide. Every thread opens with a summary you can read instead of the thread. Ask something of a partner in a message, and it comes out the other side as a dated task with the conversation still attached. The tasks from all of them collect in one list. Say once that you want to hear when a particular document lands, and you hear about it on arrival. Attachments collect into a list of their own instead of disappearing into threads. A time that four people can make gets found rather than negotiated, and clients book against availability checked against the calendar you actually keep. Seats go on and off as the firm changes.
The controls are what to hold against the questionnaire question above. Each type of action has its own position on an autonomy dial: suggest-only, then review, then fully handled. Everything ships at review, and what moving one up actually does is worth reading before you move one. Whatever Point does is recorded with a time against it, and most of it can be walked back from that record. One limit binds every product in this category: mail already sitting on somebody else’s server stays sent. Where a conversation should have no third reader, there’s a lane locked end to end. Know the cost of that lane first. Anything sent through it stays out of scoring, summaries and tasks, and Point reads it no better than a stranger would. Running a second business alongside the firm keeps the two apart, and that wall goes around a business you operate rather than around each client inside one.
Point sits in one layer and leaves the others to their own products. Your tier, your holds and your archive stay with the mail platform. Queues, assignment rules and first-response-time reporting belong to a help desk, and a firm that genuinely runs a support queue wants the desk. Your portal, your practice management and your backup stay where they are too. Everything Point does is the full inventory. And if the firm is a tax practice, a consultancy or a coaching practice, the three setup guides in this collection cover the decisions that come before any of it.
Common questions
What email tools does a five-person professional firm actually need?
Four. A mail platform on a tier that holds and searches old mail. One arrangement for the addresses more than one person answers. Something that decides what needs reading first. And one channel for the documents that go outside email. The first is a purchase you already make. The second is usually free inside it. The third is the one worth adding. The fourth is often already part of your practice management. Most firms that feel over-tooled are paying twice in the second and third categories.
Which Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace tier does a small firm need?
The one that includes archiving and hold, if your firm has a retention obligation it can state, or could be in a dispute about correspondence. On Microsoft that’s Business Premium at $22 per user per month, since Business Basic and Business Standard need Exchange Online Archiving as a paid add-on to get in-place hold and litigation hold. On Google it’s Business Plus. That’s where Vault starts, and Business Starter and Business Standard sit below it. If your practice is clear of both, the middle tier is usually the right call.
Do we need a shared inbox tool like Front or Help Scout?
Only if your inbound is genuinely a queue. The test is whether you’d measure first response time, and whether that number would mean something. If yes, buy the desk. If your inbound is thirty messages a day from clients who chose you, a Microsoft 365 shared mailbox or a Google Groups collaborative inbox does the same job for nothing. Add one named person per address, and your clients keep seeing a person rather than a ticket number.
Is our email backed up?
Not in the way most people mean. On Microsoft, permanently deleted items are held 14 days by default and 30 at most. On Google, mail sits in Trash for 30 days, and administrators have 25 more after that. Then it’s gone for everyone, including Google. Both platforms extend that indefinitely under a hold or a retention policy, and both put those in an upper tier. A hold, a retention policy and a backup solve different problems, so decide which of the three you need.
Can a professional firm run on Microsoft 365 Business Basic?
It can run, and for some firms it’s fine. Two things to know first. Business Basic gives you web and mobile versions of the Office apps rather than desktop ones. And archiving arrives as a paid add-on there, which is how in-place hold and litigation hold arrive too. If either matters to your practice, the $7 tier is the one whose cost arrives later.
How many email tools is too many?
Count accounts rather than subscriptions. A firm without an IT person administers about four products well. That means creating the accounts, enrolling the second factors, reviewing the permissions, and closing them all on somebody’s last day. Past four, the account nobody closed is the one that turns up in an incident, and the tool nobody administers quietly stops being backed by anyone.
Do we need a separate email archiving product?
Usually not, if you bought the tier that already archives. It’s the most common duplicate purchase in this category. The archiving vendor and the platform vendor both sell against the same fear, and only one of them is already on your bill. The firm that does need a separate product is the one whose obligation names an independent copy, and that firm knows it from the obligation rather than from a sales call.
The short version
- The tier is the decision, and the platform is the easy part. Holds, retention and the ability to search and export old mail live in Business Premium on Microsoft and Business Plus on Google. Move up whenever you like, and the mail you let go stays gone.
- The shared inbox you already own does assignment and resolution states for nothing. The paid version is a help desk, and at six seats it costs more per month than the mail platform. Buy it when your inbound is a queue you’d measure.
- Permanently deleted mail lasts 14 days on Microsoft and 55 on Google. A hold, a retention policy and a backup answer three different fears. Most small firms need the first two, and both come with the tier.
- The layer that decides what to read first is the one that removes work instead of adding a place to look, and it overlaps with the shared inbox layer more than any other pair. Pick one as the surface.
- Dollars are the easy number, so count the accounts. Four products is about what a firm with no IT person administers well.
- Fix the tier. Name a person per shared address. Add the reading layer, then scheduling, then everything else at renewal.
For the setup decisions that come before any of this, the three vertical guides in this collection cover an accounting practice, a consultancy and a coaching practice. For the category that sits in the third layer, what an AI email client is marks out the options. Then there’s Point itself.