Email shows up on the software bill as one line, usually the biggest one. Underneath that line sit four separate purchases sold under a single name. Most firms price one of the four and inherit the other three, then meet what they inherited on the week it matters. If that’s your firm, you’re in ordinary company. Here’s what each of the four is, what it costs, and which decisions belong before the event rather than after.
- The domain is the asset. The mailbox is a tenancy on it. Keep the two straight and the firm keeps reaching its own mail.
- Retention, archiving and the power to preserve a mailbox are sold as a tier. On both major platforms they sit one step above the tier most small firms buy.
- Addresses and seats are two different counts. Firms routinely buy licenses for
info@andbilling@that neither platform requires. - A mailbox costs more once its owner leaves, or it gets deleted. Which one happens depends on a decision made before the last day.
- The fourth purchase is the client, the thing you look at all day. It’s the only one of the four measured in hours rather than dollars, and it’s almost never priced at all.
Four purchases wearing one name
When somebody says the firm pays for email, they mean one invoice. Underneath it sit four separable things.
The domain. A registration, a set of DNS records, and an account that controls both. It’s what makes an address yours. It’s also the one piece here that’s gone for good if you lose it.
The mailbox. The per-seat platform license, meaning Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. This is the line on the invoice. It’s also where staff accounts live, which makes it load-bearing for the rest of the stack. The nine jobs a small firm covers in software works through why this one purchase carries several jobs at once.
Retention and preservation. Keeping mail beyond what a user deletes, searching several years of it, and freezing a mailbox when something legal starts. This is the one worth being exact about, because it’s the mistake that costs. It isn’t a switch inside your plan. It’s a higher plan.
The client. Whatever your people open in the morning. The platform hands you one for free, which is why it reads as scenery rather than a purchase. It’s where the working day goes.
Most firms buy the mailbox carefully and take whatever it includes for retention. The domain comes up the day it breaks. The fourth stays unpriced.
The one piece you cannot buy again
Your domain is the identity every other purchase is registered against. Let it lapse, or let the account holding it walk out with somebody, and you lose the mail sent to the firm. You also lose the ability to reset passwords on everything else, because password resets go to mail on that domain.
Two questions settle it, and they take five minutes. Which registrar holds the domain? Which account there controls it? If the answer to the second is a personal address belonging to one person, or a web designer you last spoke to in 2021, that’s the first thing on the list. It goes ahead of every product decision below.
The second thing living in DNS is your ability to send. Google’s sender guidelines require every sender to Gmail accounts to “set up SPF or DKIM email authentication for your sending domains,” a requirement that took effect on February 1, 2024 (Google email sender guidelines, checked September 7, 2026). Bulk senders, defined as those sending “more than 5,000 messages per day to Gmail accounts,” also have to publish DMARC. A firm of eight sits far under that threshold, so the practical version is short. Authentication has to exist, and it has to know about every tool you’ve authorized to send as you. Invoicing software, a scheduling page and a newsletter tool each send mail wearing your domain’s name. Each one is a DNS entry somebody made and nobody wrote down. When a client says your invoices are landing in spam, this is where the answer is.
What the tier is actually selling you
The step between platform tiers is sold as features and storage. What you’re mostly buying is compliance.
On the Microsoft side, the business plan comparison page lists Business Basic at “$7.00 user/month, paid yearly.” Business Standard with Copilot is “$23.50 user/month, paid yearly,” and Business Premium with Copilot is “$32.00 user/month, paid yearly” (Microsoft 365 business plans, checked September 7, 2026). The same page gives Business Standard “100 GB primary and 50 GB archive storage per user” and Business Premium “100 GB primary and 1.5 TB archive storage per user.”
The feature that decides the tier sits in the service description rather than on the pricing page. Microsoft’s Exchange Online service description lists In-Place Hold and Litigation Hold as unavailable on Business Basic and Business Standard, and available on Business Premium, on Exchange Online Plan 2 and on the E3 and E5 plans. Exchange Online Archiving is drawn the same way (Exchange Online service description, checked September 7, 2026). So the roughly eight and a half dollars a seat between Standard and Premium buys a great deal besides mail. It’s also the line that decides whether your firm can freeze a mailbox.
Google draws the boundary in the same place. Its edition comparison lists “Google Vault for eDiscovery and information governance” on Business Plus, and not on Business Starter or Business Standard (compare Business editions, checked September 7, 2026). Vault is where retention rules, holds, search across the whole domain and export live. Below it you have mail. Above it you have a record.
Both vendors cap their small-business plans at 300 users, so both ceilings sit well above you. Storage is a separate question, and it moves faster than firms expect. That sits in the stack overview, alongside the rest of what your existing plan already includes.
The honest summary is short. If your firm will never be asked to produce two years of correspondence with a named client, the lower tier is correct and the money is better spent elsewhere. If your work involves engagement letters, disputes about what was agreed, or client financial information, you’re buying the upper tier eventually. Buying it late is the expensive version.
Retention has to exist before you need it
This is the part that catches firms. Most software decisions wait for you. This one has a clock on it.
Preservation is prospective. Google’s Vault FAQ puts the mechanism plainly. “Users can delete messages and items in Google services, but any data that’s subject to a retention rule or hold remains available to Vault users in Vault” (Google Vault FAQ, checked September 7, 2026). The rule protects what exists while the rule is running. A rule created on Tuesday covers the threads still sitting there on Tuesday. The one somebody cleared out on Monday is gone.
The same FAQ is worth reading for what Vault is for. “Vault isn’t designed to be a backup or archive tool.” A hold is a legal instrument, and firms reach for it as a safety net all the time. If your worry is a person deleting the wrong folder rather than a court asking for records, that’s a different purchase with different economics. Naming which of the two you’re actually solving is worth the minute it takes.
There’s a legal floor under this. Rule 37(e) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure applies when “electronically stored information that should have been preserved in the anticipation or conduct of litigation is lost because a party failed to take reasonable steps to preserve it” (FRCP 37(e)). The duty starts when litigation is reasonably anticipated, which is generally earlier than when a complaint arrives. It applies to a four-person firm the same way it applies to a large one. Whether you can act on it in the hour you hear about it depends on which tier you were already on.
The rule pushing the other way lands on the same mailboxes, so it’s worth knowing at the same time. If your firm handles clients’ financial information, 16 CFR 314.4(c)(6) of the FTC Safeguards Rule requires you to “develop, implement, and maintain procedures for the secure disposal of customer information in any format no later than two years after the last date the information is used in connection with the provision of a product or service to the customer to which it relates.” Three exceptions come with it. Information you still need, information the law requires you to keep, and cases “where targeted disposal is not reasonably feasible due to the manner in which the information is maintained.” The provision then asks you to “periodically review your data retention policy to minimize the unnecessary retention of data.” Mail archives are the clearest example of that last exception. They’re also the clearest reason to keep reviewing it rather than leaning on it forever. Whether the Safeguards Rule reaches your firm at all is settled in the stack overview, which also covers the two provisions that constrain which products you may buy.
Read together, they describe one decision rather than two. How long the firm keeps client correspondence, decided deliberately, written down once, and set on the platform while nothing is happening. Keeping everything forever by accident is a position too, and it’s the one with the most exposure in both directions.
Addresses are not seats
The most common overspend in this part of the stack is buying a license for an address rather than for a person.
A shared mailbox for something like info@ or billing@ is an address, and your people read it from the seats they already have. Microsoft’s documentation states that “to access a shared mailbox, a user must have an Exchange Online license, but the shared mailbox doesn’t require a separate license,” and that without one it is capped at 50 GB (Exchange Online limits, checked September 7, 2026). A license becomes necessary at the edges. Microsoft lists three of them. A shared mailbox over 50 GB in use, one using in place archiving, and one placed on litigation hold (create a shared mailbox, checked September 7, 2026). Google’s equivalent economy is aliases, where its admin help states you “can add up to 30 email aliases for each user at no extra cost” (email aliases, checked September 7, 2026).
So a firm of six people with eleven addresses pays for six seats. A firm paying for eleven is spending five seats of pure waste every month. It’s the single easiest thing to find the next time you look at the bill. Cutting overlapping subscriptions is the guide for doing that across the whole stack with everything still working.
One distinction to keep, because it costs money in the other direction. A shared mailbox is a place several people read the same messages. A support desk assigns, queues, escalates and reports on response times, and that’s a different product. A firm whose inbound genuinely behaves like a queue wants the one built for it. A firm where three people occasionally answer the general address is already done with the shared address.
What a mailbox costs after somebody leaves
Headcount goes down and the mail stays relevant, which is a shape peculiar to email.
Microsoft’s position is exact, and it’s worth knowing before rather than during. When the account is removed, “the employee’s mailbox data is retained for 30 days after the account is removed,” and after 30 days “the data is permanently removed.” A hold applied before the account is deleted converts the mailbox into an inactive mailbox instead. The documentation is blunt about the sequence. “If the hold isn’t applied, the mailbox won’t be converted into an inactive mailbox” (inactive mailboxes, checked September 7, 2026). The Exchange Online service description also lists inactive mailboxes as an E3, E5 and Exchange Online Plan 2 capability rather than a Business one. On a Business plan that leaves two realistic options. Keep paying for the seat, or get the mail out before the account goes.
Google gives you a shorter clock and a cheaper long-term answer. A deleted account can be restored “up to 20 days after deleting it,” and after that “the data is gone and you can’t restore it” (restore a recently deleted user, checked September 7, 2026). Archiving the account instead is supported on “Business Starter, Business Standard, and Business Plus; Enterprise Standard and Enterprise Plus” among others (archive former employee accounts, checked September 7, 2026). Google is clear about the bill that comes with it. “Google Workspace license fees for the account holding the transferred data are still necessary. This includes AU licenses” (options to preserve former employee data, checked September 7, 2026).
The budgeting consequence is one sentence. Your seat count is headcount plus everybody whose mail you decided to keep. A firm of eight that has had four people through it pays for something like ten. That’s the cost of keeping a record, and it belongs in the arithmetic from the start rather than as a surprise in year four. One decision belongs on the last day itself, rather than the week after. Keep, archive or export, for this person.
Why the rest of the stack reports in here
Email is the only product in a small firm that every other product talks to, and that changes what a good purchase looks like everywhere else.
Two things flow through it. The first is notification. Your books, your signing product, your payments processor, your scheduling page and your practice management system all report status by sending you mail. So the volume of your inbox is partly a function of how many products you own. Every subscription you add is also a subscription to its notifications, and that’s a real cost that never appears on the invoice.
The second is the record. In most small firms the authoritative version of what a client agreed to lives in a thread rather than in the CRM. That’s simply what happens when the client’s preferred channel is mail and the CRM is a place somebody types things afterward. Your firm is normal here. It’s also why the retention decision above is a records decision rather than an IT one.
Both of those make one test worth applying to any new tool. Does it reach into the mail you already run, or does it become a second place to check? A tool that only reports by email adds noise. A tool that reads and writes where the work already is stays quiet. Which tools actually talk to your inbox is the guide that works that through. It’s the difference between a stack of nine products and a stack of nine inboxes.
The hour nobody puts on the bill
The fourth purchase is one you already made, without ever deciding to.
Somebody in your firm opens mail at 8:30 and is still sorting it at 9:40. Across eight people, at any plausible hourly rate, that’s a bigger number than the entire software stack described in the overview guide. It appears on no invoice. The platform charges you for the mailbox and hands you a client for free. That’s a fine deal for storing mail, and a poor one for the part of the day that’s actually expensive.
That’s the case for treating the working layer as its own line rather than as a feature of the platform tier. It’s also the honest test for anything sold at this layer, including the product below. Does it take hours out of a specific week you can name? What to keep applies the same test to a stack that has already grown past what anybody chose.
What Point sits on, and what it leaves alone
Point is an AI email client. In the terms of this guide it’s a purchase at the fourth layer only. You connect the Gmail or Microsoft 365 mailbox the firm already pays for, so the first three layers stay as they are: the same registrar, the same seats, the same tier, the same retention rules and the same archive. Everybody keeps the address they have, and the mail stays where it is, because your platform is still the thing storing it.
That last point is the one that matters for a stack decision. What Point does gets written back into the mailbox itself, so the record your platform keeps is still the record. If you’re on Business Premium with holds configured, the holds still see everything. If you’re on a lower tier, that stays true after you add Point. Preservation is bought from the platform, and every product at this layer answers the same way.
What changes is the hour. The weighing that used to happen in your head between 8:30 and 9:40 has already happened by the time you look. The client waiting on an answer sits above the renewal notice. The method behind that order is set out separately. Every conversation carries a summary you can read instead of opening it. An ask buried in a paragraph becomes a dated task, with the thread still attached. Say once that you want to hear when a signed document lands, and you hear about it the day it arrives. Finding a time four people can make stops being a thread. Clients book against availability that’s been reconciled with the calendar you actually keep. Search works on meaning rather than exact words, which is what you want when the thing you half remember was written by somebody else. Work and personal sit in separate lanes. A second business you run stays out of the first one’s view. A seat goes on as somebody joins and comes off as they go.
The controls are the part to weigh against your own vendor rules. Each kind of action has its own autonomy setting with three positions. Suggest-only, review, and fully handled. A new account arrives with every one of them on review. Moving any of them up is a decision worth understanding first, and the dial covers it. Whatever Point handled appears in a log with a timestamp, and most of it can be reversed from there. One exception is shared by every product in this category. Once a message has reached the recipient’s server, no vendor can reach in and retrieve it. Pricing is private beta and per seat, so it sits in the per-seat column of your arithmetic alongside the platform.
Two places it genuinely doesn’t fit, and both are worth naming. A firm whose inbound is a support desk wants a shared inbox with queues, assignment and response time reporting, and that’s a different product. Retention, holds and eDiscovery are the platform’s job, and they stay there. Everything Point does is the full list if you want to check it against your own week.
Common questions
Do we need Microsoft 365 Business Premium, or is Business Standard enough?
The dividing line is preservation. Microsoft’s Exchange Online service description lists In-Place Hold, Litigation Hold and Exchange Online Archiving as unavailable on Business Basic and Business Standard, and available on Business Premium. The archive allowance goes from 50 GB per user to 1.5 TB. If your firm might ever need to freeze a mailbox or produce years of correspondence, Premium is the tier that can do it. Otherwise Standard is a legitimate answer, and the difference is better spent elsewhere.
Does an AI email client replace Google Workspace or Microsoft 365?
No, and it shouldn’t. A client signs in to the mailbox you already pay for, so your domain, addresses, storage, retention and holds all stay with the platform. It’s an additional per-seat line rather than a replacement for one, and it leaves a tier problem exactly where it found it. If you need holds, you buy them from Microsoft or Google, whatever you read your mail in.
Do we have to pay for a mailbox for info@ or billing@?
Usually not. Microsoft states that a shared mailbox does not require its own license and is capped at 50 GB without one. Google allows up to 30 email aliases per user at no extra cost. A license is needed only at the edges, such as a shared mailbox above 50 GB or one you want to place on litigation hold. A firm paying a full seat for every address it publishes is paying for something neither platform requires.
How long should a small firm keep client email?
Long enough to answer questions about the work, and for a period you picked on purpose. Two rules pull in opposite directions. FRCP 37(e) penalizes losing electronically stored information you should have preserved once litigation is reasonably anticipated. For firms handling clients’ financial information, 16 CFR 314.4(c)(6) requires secure disposal procedures no later than two years after the information was last used, subject to exceptions. The practical answer is to pick a period, set it on the platform, and review it, so deletion follows one rule rather than each person’s habit.
What happens to a departing employee’s email?
On Microsoft 365, the mailbox data is retained for 30 days after the account is removed and is permanently removed after that. A hold applied before deletion converts it to an inactive mailbox instead. On Google Workspace, a deleted user can be restored for 20 days, after which the data is gone. Archiving the account preserves it, and Google is explicit that a license fee still applies. In all three cases the decision belongs before the account is removed.
Is a retention policy the same as a backup?
No. Google’s own Vault FAQ says Vault “isn’t designed to be a backup or archive tool,” and holds behave the same way on the Microsoft side. They preserve what exists from the moment they’re applied, and what was already purged stays purged. If your concern is somebody deleting the wrong thing, that’s a separate product decision with its own cost. It’s worth being clear which of the two problems you’re buying for.
Can we just use personal Gmail addresses to save money?
Only up to the first month of having staff. The platform seat is what creates and closes an account. It’s what gives you something to close when somebody leaves, a shared record of the correspondence, and a way to authenticate mail sent as the firm. The saving is real and small, and what it buys you is an asset sitting on somebody’s personal phone.
The short version
- Email is four purchases: the domain, the mailbox seat, the retention tier, and the client your people work in. Firms price the second and inherit the rest.
- Check who controls the domain and its DNS before anything else. Every tool that sends as your firm is a record in there, and Google has required SPF or DKIM authentication from all senders since February 1, 2024.
- Holds, archiving and eDiscovery come with a tier. Microsoft puts them at Business Premium and Google puts Vault at Business Plus, so the same boundary appears on both platforms.
- Retention protects what exists while it’s running, so you buy it before the event. FRCP 37(e) is the reason to be able to preserve, and for firms handling client financial information 16 CFR 314.4(c)(6) is the reason to set an end date.
- Addresses are cheaper than seats. A shared mailbox under 50 GB runs without its own license on Microsoft, and Google allows 30 aliases per user at no extra cost.
- A mailbox outlives its owner. Microsoft deletes it 30 days after the account goes unless a hold was already applied, and Google gives you 20 days. Decide keep, archive or export on the last day.
- The client is the only one of the four measured in hours, and it’s the one nobody prices. That’s where an assistance layer earns its per-seat cost, and everything the platform tier is responsible for stays with the platform.
For the whole picture this sits inside, start with the nine jobs a small firm covers. For the products already on your bill, cutting overlapping subscriptions and what to keep are the two that undo the growth.