# Free email vs Paid email

Arjan Cornelissen
2017-06-21
office-365

Since I started my own company I am more aware of the impact of a domain name for your company. Not only for your website but also for your email address.

## Free email

So let’s start with what I mean by free email. These are the providers where you just can register and get an email address for ‘free’.

## Paid email

These are the providers where you pay some amount of money to host your email, usually you get this with your hosting provider or you can go with another party to host it like Office 365, Gmail for Business.

## Branding

The most important part of your company is how your customers can reach you, this can be done by visiting your website, send an email or by phone. My feeling with a company that uses a free email address gives themselves not enough credit for how they brand themselves to the outside world.

## Privacy

When you use a free email provider, privacy is usually the first one that will be sacrificed. Most users do not know this because they do not read the agreements before signing up for the account.

## Costs

The costs of an email address can be just hard cash or with your privacy. When you choose for a paid email provider the cost can be from a few Euro’s/Dollars per month to around 10 Euro’s/Dollars depending on the provider or options of the email provider.

## Accessibility

Nowadays we have at least 2 devices if not more where we check our email on. This can give some challenges with some of the hosting companies because they have their own system and synching that to your phone, tablet and computer can sometimes a challenging task.

## Compatibility

Not everybody thinks about this one, because email is email, right? Well the email part is not the problem here, but when you run a business you also make appointments and invite other people for those appointments.

## Conclusion

Selecting your email provider is not as easy as it might see. The choice between free and paid is very easy in my opinion.