FounderMail vs Migadu

Migadu figured out something most of this industry still hasn't: charging per mailbox is charging for the wrong thing. A dormant mailbox costs a database row. They price flat, per account, with unlimited mailboxes and unlimited domains, and meter what actually costs money — volume and storage. We built FounderMail on the same principle, and we got there partly by reading their pricing page.

So this is not a comparison where we explain why the other option is a trap. On plumbing, they are cheaper than us. Here is the detail.

The numbers

Read that honestly: Migadu Mini is cheaper, allows twice the inbound and gives more storage. They also run a $19/year Micro plan that no one else in this market comes close to. If what you want is a competent, ethically-run mailbox host and nothing else, Migadu is excellent and you should buy it.

Daily caps versus monthly caps

One real difference in the metering, and it cuts both ways. Migadu's limits are daily; ours are monthly. Daily caps are easier to reason about and harder to blow through by accident over a month. Monthly caps absorb bursts — a launch day, a Show HN, an outage that generates 800 support emails in an afternoon — without you hitting a wall at 4pm.

Migadu handles overage gracefully: a 25% tolerance, then inbound is deferred rather than bounced, and their storage limits are soft so mail never bounces for a full mailbox. That is a considerate design and we copied the spirit of it — we degrade rather than refuse, and a spam-filter outage never becomes a mail outage.

What the extra $30 a year is for

Exactly one thing, really, and it is the reason FounderMail exists: the interface.

• Mail grouped by customer. Every message from one person, across every mailbox in the account, in a single timeline. If someone writes to billing@ about an invoice and support@ about a bug, you see one customer with two threads. Migadu shows you two mailboxes, because Migadu is a mail host and mail hosts organise around mailboxes.
• Your app's data beside the thread. Push a contact's plan, MRR, signup date and user id through the link API and it renders in the sidebar next to their mail.
• One-click DNS. If your registrar supports Domain Connect — GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, Squarespace, about 80 others — we write the MX, SPF and DKIM records for you. No one in the mailbox tier automates this, Migadu included.
• A permanent free tier. Migadu's cheapest is $19/year. Ours is $0, with IMAP and SMTP on it, which makes it reasonable to point a dormant side project at us forever.

Where Migadu is better

• Price, at every tier, for pure hosting.
• Inbound headroom on the comparable plan.
• Track record. They have been running since 2018 with a good reputation and no drama. We launched this year.
• Simplicity. If you already live in Apple Mail and never want a web interface, our differentiator is worth nothing to you and you are paying for it.

How to choose

Ask what you do when a customer emails you. If the answer is "open Apple Mail and reply", buy Migadu — it is the better-value version of exactly that. If the answer involves checking three inboxes to work out whether the person emailing support@ is the same person who queried an invoice last week, that is the problem we built for, and it is not one a cheaper mailbox fixes.

Start free — no card. Both of us speak IMAP, so trying one does not trap you in it.

Migadu pricing verified against migadu.com/pricing in September 2026. Daily-to-monthly conversions above are approximate.