What you get for free
Nexmail is free for up to 9 seats. A seat is a person on your team or a shared mailbox such as support@ or hello@, so a team of five with four shared addresses fits. On the Free plan you get:
- An address at your domain for everyone, such as anna@yourcompany.com, plus shared addresses the whole team answers.
- One shared inbox where conversations can be assigned, labelled, snoozed and noted on. See Shared inbox.
- New mail announced in the Slack channel that owns each address, with replies possible from Slack.
- A team calendar that syncs both ways with Google, Outlook and CalDAV, and booking links.
- Checks on every send for spoofed links, risky attachments and unsubscribed recipients.
- Campaigns, contacts, newsletters, templates and Draft with AI (with the sales pipeline turned on).
The Team plan adds more than 9 seats, the meeting notetaker and the AI calendar reader. Everything else is in both plans.
Why it can be free
Most business email is priced per mailbox because the provider stores and delivers every message itself. Nexmail splits that job differently: mail for your domain arrives through Resend’s inbound (or your own Postfix or Mailu server), and replies leave through your own Resend, Brevo, Amazon SES, SMTP2GO or SMTP account. You hold those accounts and they bill you directly.
Resend and Brevo both have free plans meant for low volumes, which covers the day-to-day mail of many small teams. If you send a lot, for example large campaigns, you move onto their paid plans at their rates. Check their sites for current limits, because they change them from time to time.
What Nexmail is not
It is worth being clear about this before you move your domain’s mail:
- Nexmail is a web app. It does not give each person an IMAP or POP mailbox to open in Outlook, Apple Mail or a phone’s mail app. If your team lives in desktop mail clients, a hosted mailbox provider fits better; see Nexmail vs Zoho Mail.
- It is built around a team answering mail together. A single person who only wants a private address may find a plain mailbox simpler.
- Adding the receiving MX record moves where your domain’s mail goes. If mail already reaches another provider, plan the switch, or receive through Gmail instead.
What happens when something fails
Free should not mean fragile. A message that cannot be saved when it arrives is refused with an error, so the sending server retries instead of the mail vanishing. Mail that matches no route is kept and listed under Unrouted. On the way out, three failures in a row move traffic to your next provider, and if none is available the message waits in the queue rather than being marked failed. Daily sending limits and an emergency stop in Settings → Sending & stop keep a mistake from turning into a flood.
The DNS records involved
To send from your domain you publish SPF, DKIM and DMARC records; to receive, one MX record. Nexmail shows the exact values and checks them through public resolvers. The step-by-step guide walks through each one, and SPF, DKIM and DMARC explained covers what they do.
How to set it up
- Create a workspace. Sign up and name your organization. The Free plan covers up to 9 seats and needs no card.
- Add your domain. Open Get started and add the domain you own. Nexmail lists the DNS records it needs, or publishes them for you on Cloudflare, Vercel or DigitalOcean. See Connect your domain.
- Connect a sending provider. Connect Resend in one click, or add Brevo, Amazon SES, SMTP2GO or any SMTP server under Settings → Providers. Add more than one and Nexmail fails over between them.
- Invite the team and add shared addresses. On Teammates, invite people by email and create general mailboxes such as support@, shared with everyone or only the people you pick.
- Send a test and route it. Send yourself a message, reply to it, and, if you use Slack, connect it under Settings → Slack and choose which channel hears about each address.
Questions
Is Nexmail really free for business email?
Yes, for up to 9 seats, where a seat is a person or a shared mailbox. You pay your own sending provider only if you outgrow its free plan. The Team plan is for more seats, the meeting notetaker and the AI calendar reader.
Do I need to buy a domain?
For team addresses at your own name, yes. A domain usually costs a small yearly fee at any registrar. Nexmail then needs a few DNS records on it, which it can publish for you on Cloudflare, Vercel or DigitalOcean.
Can I use Outlook or Apple Mail with it?
Not as a mailbox. Nexmail runs in the browser and does not offer IMAP or POP access. If desktop or phone mail clients matter most, a hosted mailbox provider is a better fit.
What happens if we grow past 9 people?
Mail keeps arriving and leaving. Going over the limit only stops adding seats until the owner upgrades to Team in Settings → Billing.
Who can read our email?
Your team, within the mailboxes each person is given. Each organization is kept separate from every other, and provider keys are stored encrypted and shown back only as masked hints. See the Privacy Policy.
Read next
- How to set up email on your own domain — Step by step: set up email on a domain you own. The MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, where to add them, and how to check that mail arrives and sends.
- Shared inbox for small teams — A free shared inbox for support@, sales@ and hello@: assign conversations, leave internal notes, route each address to Slack and draft replies with AI.
- Pricing — Nexmail is free for up to 9 seats, calendar, booking links and Draft with AI included. The Team plan adds more seats, the meeting notetaker and the AI calendar reader. Use your own Resend or Brevo account on their free plans and a small team pays nothing.