Pay once for mailboxes, not per seat each quarter

Your payment covers mailboxes your team can sign into, send from and manage. Each one works over standard SMTP and IMAP, so existing clients and internal tooling can connect without a new sending stack. Browser webmail comes included for anyone who prefers a window instead of a configured desktop client.

Warm-up and authentication checks sit alongside setup, which matters when your domain is new to a provider or your sending history is thin. Those checks run before volume grows, giving your team a record of what was configured. The tier table, published on softwareprogrammer.app, lists mailbox counts and nothing hidden behind a per-seat meter.

Procurement sees a single purchase rather than a subscription line that grows with headcount. When a colleague joins mid-year, you are working within a mailbox count you already own, so hiring does not automatically raise the bill. That is the practical difference between this and seat-based sending tools your finance team already reviews each quarter.

Moving from Starter to Studio to Floor changes one variable: how many mailboxes you hold. The published tiers list five, fifteen and fifty. Nothing in the climb alters what a mailbox does, so each tier gives the same standard SMTP and IMAP access, webmail and setup checks, simply repeated across more accounts.

Choose the count by counting the people and roles that need their own inbox, plus any shared addresses your team sends from. A support desk might want several; a small marketing group might need one per sender. Write that number down before you look at the tiers, because it is the only figure that decides your outcome.

Buying higher than you need ties money up in mailboxes nobody signs into. Buying lower forces a second purchase later, which is exactly the renewal cycle your team set out to avoid. The tiers reward an accurate count, so spend an afternoon on the count rather than on the comparison.

The common worry is that a fixed purchase will not flex as the company grows. That worry is fair when headcount is unpredictable, and it is worth naming in the procurement note. The counter is that a lifetime tier removes the quarterly per-seat increase, provided your count is realistic rather than optimistic.

A second hesitation is scope. The product supplies mailboxes, not a sending platform around them, so teams expecting built-in campaign tools will find gaps. Read the published table closely and decide whether surrounding services are needed, because those are priced on their own and sit outside the tier.

Treat both hesitations as planning questions with answers. Map the mailbox count to named people, list any surrounding services separately, and record the assumption in writing. When the renewal conversation would have happened, your team instead reviews whether the count still fits.

Compare two tiers only after fixing your mailbox count. If your list lands near five, Starter is the honest buy and Studio is money set aside for people who do not exist yet. If it lands near fifteen, Studio removes the second purchase and the paperwork that follows it.

Weigh the cost of being wrong in each direction. Underbuying means another procurement round and another approval; overbuying means idle mailboxes with no way to reclaim the spend. For a team that values buying once, the tier that covers your count with least surplus is usually the safer of the two.

Run the same test for Floor against Studio if your count is larger. Thirty named mailboxes sit closer to Floor than to Studio, and squeezing them into fifteen creates shared inboxes and muddled ownership. Match the tier to the count, sign once, and move the discussion back to the work.