Email forwarding pricing guide: what limits matter?

Quick answer for email forwarding pricing

Pick a plan by the first limit you will hit, not by the adjective on the marketing row. MailerZ Free is $0: one domain, three aliases, one seat, a 14-day store, send-as disabled, SMTP and API disabled. Solo is $40 per year: 3 domains, 15 aliases, 90-day store, 1,000 outgoing, 5 send-as per hour. Starter is $8 monthly or $80 yearly. Business is $19 or $190. Agency is $39 or $390. Unlimited is $99/month or $990/year. Confirm MailerZ pricing the day you buy. Annual Starter, Business, and Agency include two months free versus paying monthly for a year. Solo has no monthly option.

Those numbers are capacity. They are not a promise that Gmail will place mail in Primary. Google’s own guidance on helpful pages is about people-first content, not SMTP; see Google’s creating helpful, reliable, people-first content. Do not treat a ranking essay as a deliverability SLA. IETF RFC 5321 — Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is still the transport.

The limits that actually bite: leftover MX (every plan), alias ceilings (Free at three), send-as (absent on Free), store length (14 versus 90 days), hourly send-as, and monthly outgoing. Catch-all FORWARD is a paid policy, not a way to avoid counting aliases. Dashboard seats on Starter and above are operators, not extra Gmail logins.

A useful email forwarding pricing guide starts with jobs you can fail in public. Inbound proof is one job. Outbound identity is another. Recovery evidence is a third. Paying for Agency to “feel safer” while Google MX remains published is wasting the card.

The user problem and the decision criteria

Buyers shop stickers because stickers are easy. They announce hello@ on Free, then discover send-as is not included. They buy Business because a competitor used a large number, then print four aliases. They compare monthly $8 to a suite seat without counting that Gmail is already paid. The email forwarding pricing setup that works is a list of limits you will hit this quarter.

Product surface lives on MailerZ features. If you are leaving another forwarder, use the migration planner and keep a rollback MX until the external test passes.

Technical mail flow

Price does not change SMTP. A sender looks up MX, connects, offers MAIL FROM, names RCPT TO, and transfers content. MailerZ accepts for a verified domain and a matching alias, stores required content, then forwards. Envelope SRS may rewrite the return path. Header From is never rewritten. Subject, Date, Message-ID, body, and MIME stay as received. Gmail or Outlook files the copy.

Unknown recipients on Free are held. That is a cost control: harvested directories do not become a surprise delivery bill. Paid catch-all FORWARD is a yearly policy after you have seen the hold queue. Enabling it on day one to “feel complete” is how you pay in attention.

Outbound SMTP exists only on paid plans. The session authenticates, checks the From identity, applies hourly and monthly caps, and submits. Unauthorized or unhosted recipients get 550. MailerZ is not an open relay. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are records, not add-on SKUs. IETF RFC 7208 — Sender Policy Framework (SPF), IETF RFC 6376 — DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and IETF RFC 7489 — Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) are the documents. They do not move mail into Primary.

Recovery storage is 14 days on Free and 90 days on paid. That window is why Solo exists for people who send rarely: a failed hop in week three is still readable. It is not a compliance vault. Long-term archive stays in Gmail. Do not budget MailerZ as legal hold.

Leftover MX is the limit that does not appear on a pricing card and still decides whether you received anything. Old Google, Microsoft, or registrar records beside MailerZ split inbound. Paying Business does not merge them. Treat leftover MX as a hard stop on every plan.

Self-send from Gmail to the same Gmail account can short-circuit. That ghost is not a billing defect. Budget an external mailbox as a tool. The probe is part of email forwarding pricing setup.

Campaign volume does not belong on these cards. If the real job is a newsletter, buy a campaign platform. Hitting Solo’s 100 outgoing or 5 send-as per hour and calling it an outage is a category error.

Seats confuse pricing conversations. Starter’s five seats are people who can operate the MailerZ dashboard. They are not five hosted mailboxes and not five Gmail logins. If your spreadsheet assumed “seat equals inbox,” rewrite the spreadsheet. The inbox is still Gmail or Outlook unless you bought a suite.

Unknown-recipient policy is a priced behavior. Free holds. That is cheaper than forwarding every typo and harvested guess into a human inbox. Paid catch-all FORWARD looks generous until the hold queue would have shown you the noise. Watch hold for a week on Free or paid before you pay to forward leftovers. That is email forwarding pricing best practice, not stinginess.

Header From preservation is not a paid add-on. Free and paid share it. A cheaper forwarder that rewrites From can look inexpensive until every reply thread looks wrong and DKIM no longer aligns to the author. MailerZ does not rewrite that header. You still do not get a placement promise. You get an identity that matches the message you accepted.

Two-direction testing belongs on the same page as price. Inbound proof is required on every plan. Outbound proof is required only after you pay for send-as. Skipping inbound and jumping to Gmail SMTP is how teams waste an afternoon and then blame the card. The sequence is: verify, MX, leftover cleanup, external inbound probe, then SMTP if the plan includes it.

Registrar cost sits next to MailerZ and is not optional. A .com renewal is often tens of dollars. Quote your registrar. DNS at the same registrar is usually included. That line does not change when you move from Free to Solo. The delivery layer is the incremental bill.

Hybrid with a suite does not create a third MailerZ SKU. If some humans need hosted mailboxes, price those seats at the suite vendor. Price aliases at MailerZ. Do not publish two MX sets and call it hybrid. Accidental dual MX is split delivery. Design one inbound owner.

Step-by-step setup and decision path

1. Write the limits you will hit

   Example: “One domain, four aliases, branded replies, 90-day evidence.” That line already excludes Free. If you cannot fill the line, you are shopping adjectives. Write the jobs in one sentence a teammate can fail in public.

2. Match the first ceiling

   Send-as → Solo or higher. Four aliases → Solo. Two domains → Starter. Hourly bursts above 5 → Starter or above. Do not buy Agency first to feel closer to a suite. The first ceiling is the plan.

3. Add one domain and the aliases you can name

   Use the root domain, not a mailbox and not https. Publish the unique verification TXT. Map each printed local-part to a verified destination. Do not loop the destination back to the alias. Loops look like vanished mail and waste the first month of a paid plan.

4. Publish one MX set and delete leftovers

   Copy hosts and priorities from the dashboard. Read the public MX set from more than one resolver if you can. Remove Google, Microsoft, or registrar leftovers. Paying Business while Google MX remains published is paying for a path senders do not take. That is the most expensive email forwarding pricing mistake that is not on the invoice.

5. Prove inbound from another mailbox

   Unique subject, unrelated sender, Header From check, delivery history. Self-send from Gmail to the same Gmail account can short-circuit. Do not refund a plan on a ghost. The probe is cheaper than a week of “mail is down.”

6. Pay before you print send-as

   Upgrade, create the SMTP credential, add Gmail Send mail as or Outlook’s manual SMTP identity, send outward to a second external inbox. Confirm host, port, username, and generated password. Do not paste a Google password. Confirm the live pricing page before you announce the address.

Failure modes and proof

Proof for a pricing argument is dull: the pricing page dated the day you bought, public MX, one inbound artifact, one outbound artifact if you paid for send-as. Do not send SMTP passwords.

MailerZ workflow and product boundary

MailerZ is a delivery layer operated by Secuno LLC. You pay for routing, evidence, and optional SMTP. You do not pay for a mailbox. Site: mailerz.net. App: mail.mailerz.net.

• Free $0: 1 domain, 3 aliases, 1 seat, 14-day store, send-as disabled, SMTP and API disabled.
• Solo $40/yr: 1 domain, 15 aliases, 90-day, 100 outgoing, 5 send-as/hr.
• Starter $8/$80: 5 domains, 50 aliases, 5 seats, 200 outgoing, 10/hr.
• Business $19/$190: 25 / 200 / 25, 400 outgoing, 15/hr.
• Agency $39/$390: 100 / 500 / 50, 800 outgoing, 25/hr.

MailerZ does not rewrite Header From, Subject, Date, Message-ID, body, or MIME. It does not offer IMAP, inbox SLAs, review counts, or SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / HIPAA. Controls: Security and Trust Center. Unauthorized send returns 550 / 550 5.7.1.

What you are buying on a paid plan is permission to finish jobs Free refuses: send-as, a longer store, more aliases and domains, optional catch-all FORWARD. What you are not buying is a different inbound mechanism. Envelope SRS and Header From rules do not upgrade with the card. If a sales call implies paid mail “delivers better,” stop the call. Filters stay with the receiver.

Operators on Starter and above can share the dashboard without becoming mailbox users. That matters when an agency manages many domains: Agency’s 50 seats and 100 domains are operator and domain ceilings, not 100 hosted inboxes. If you need 100 IMAP logins, you are shopping for hosting. Email forwarding pricing will look “too cheap” because it is a different product.

Recovery is priced as a window. Fourteen days covers a cutover weekend if someone is watching. Ninety days covers a customer who writes back in week five. Neither window is a second Gmail. If legal hold is the yearly job, keep it in Gmail or a suite archive you already run. Do not assign a dollar value to MailerZ storage as if it were Vault.

Open a body for break-glass recovery and expect an audit row. That is a control, not a marketing badge, and it is not sold as SOC 2. Do not send verification tokens or SMTP passwords to support. The artifacts that close a pricing dispute are the dated pricing card, the public MX set, and the hop history with a remote SMTP response.

If the first limit you will hit is “we need Calendar and lockable hosted mailboxes,” stop reading this as a suite replacement. Email forwarding pricing will look incomplete because the product is incomplete for that job. Buy the suite. Keep MailerZ for domains that only need routes. That split is the whole guide. Recite it before you talk to finance.

Cost, alternatives, and trade-offs

Compare email forwarding pricing to a suite only after you split seats from routes. A suite prices stored humans. MailerZ prices domains, aliases, and send ceilings. Gmail you already have is not free in the abstract, but it is already on the books.

Cloudflare Email Routing is inbound routing. It does not become MailerZ leftover-MX handling, stored hops, or send-as. ImprovMX is the closest commercial class; compare live plans. A best-practice email forwarding pricing setup is the list of limits you can recite before MX changes.

Monthly versus yearly is cash flow. Starter, Business, and Agency yearly cards save two months versus twelve monthly payments. Solo is yearly only. Do not prepay Agency because a competitor’s page used a large integer.

Time is a line item. A leftover MX incident costs more than Solo. A Free-plan branded-reply promise costs more than the upgrade. Budget one external inbound test as part of the price, not as a surprise Saturday.

Competitor stickers are research, not proof. ImprovMX and Cloudflare Email Routing publish their own limits. Read their docs if that is the stack you run. They do not inherit MailerZ leftover-MX handling, stored failed hops, or authenticated send-as because this guide named them. Compare live plans the day you buy. An email forwarding pricing guide that copies last year’s competitor table is already wrong.

Volume spikes are a limit even when the monthly average looks safe. Solo’s 5 send-as per hour will stop a burst of password-reset mail that a human triggered from a script. That is the product working. If the burst is real production, you need a higher hourly cap or a different sender. Do not open a refund ticket for a published ceiling.

Quote /pricing on the purchase day. This article can drift. The live cards cannot, at least not without a ship. That is the last email forwarding pricing rule that survives a quarter.

FAQ

Key takeaways

• Email forwarding pricing is limits: domains, aliases, store, send-as, outgoing.
• Free is inbound-only. Solo $40/yr is the smallest send-as plan.
• Starter $8/$80, Business $19/$190, Agency $39/$390. Confirm /pricing.
• Leftover MX wastes every plan. Hard stop.
• Limits are not an inbox-placement SLA.
• Header From stays original. Envelope SRS only.
• Not IMAP, not an open relay, not SOC 2.
• Test inbound from another mailbox. Self-send lies.

Conclusion and next action

If you came here for email forwarding pricing, write the limits before you shop stickers. Count aliases and domains. Say whether send-as is required. Say whether day-fifteen evidence matters. Then pick Free, Solo, or a higher card. Confirm the live page. Publish one MX set. Prove the hop from a mailbox that is not the destination.

Review quarterly, or sooner if MailerZ plan limits change. Author: MailerZ editorial, Secuno LLC.