What procurement should check before you buy mailboxes

Your finance lead will want the tier table read as a count of mailboxes, not as a monthly rate. Each lifetime tier is sized by how many mailboxes you can configure, so the useful question is how many people and shared addresses your team needs on day one, not how many it might need later.

Compare the tier count against your current directory. If your team already runs a mail server, the count is the number of accounts you will migrate and the number of shared inboxes you will recreate. That figure is usually smaller than the headcount on the distribution list, which matters when procurement asks why the tier is not larger.

Keep the published table in front of you during the review. The tiers are listed by mailbox count, and anything that is not a mailbox sits outside the tier. Reading the table this way stops a renewal conversation before it starts, because a lifetime tier has no renewal date attached to it.

Across the three tiers you get the same kind of working mailbox: standard SMTP and IMAP, browser webmail for people who do not want a desktop client, and warm-up and authentication checks to run alongside setup. The tiers differ in how many mailboxes you can create, not in the kind of mailbox you get.

The smallest tier suits a pilot group, such as a support desk or a small outbound team, where a handful of addresses need to be configured and tested. The middle tier fits a department that has outgrown a pilot but does not want to manage a full server. The largest tier suits a team that needs a broader set of addresses under one purchase.

Work through the count with the people who will actually use the mailboxes. Ask each team lead how many addresses they need to send from and receive into, then add the shared inboxes. That count tells you which tier to buy without buying a tier you will not fill.

The hesitation is usually about growth, not about the product. Per-seat pricing elsewhere rises as the team grows, and procurement has learned to expect a renewal conversation every year. A lifetime tier by mailbox count removes the renewal cycle, but it also means the count is fixed at purchase, so the team has to be honest about how many mailboxes it needs.

Another source of doubt is what the team is responsible for after purchase. The mailboxes arrive with authentication and warm-up checks, but inbox placement is not promised, and the list of recipients is your own research. Teams that expect the product to supply contacts or guarantee delivery will be disappointed; teams that treat it as mailbox infrastructure will not.

The last hesitation is about scope. Extra services are priced separately, so a team that assumes everything is included will be surprised at the invoice. Reading the tier table and the separate service list before you sign removes that surprise and gives procurement a clean line to approve.

Anything beyond the mailbox count carries its own price. That includes services the team may want later, such as additional setup work or anything listed outside the tier table. Your procurement contact should see that list at the same time as the tier table, so the approval covers both.

The tier itself covers the mailboxes, the webmail, and the checks that sit alongside setup. It does not cover the research that fills those mailboxes with recipients, and it does not cover the people who write and send the messages. Those are internal costs, and they belong in the same budget conversation as the tier.

When you present the purchase, separate the one-time tier cost from the internal work of running the mailboxes. That framing answers the objection about per-seat growth directly: the tier does not grow with headcount, and the internal work is the part the team controls.