LocalSMTP for startups: choose a mailbox count before you commit

Three decisions sit in front of you before any payment: how many people need a mailbox, whether the browser webmail matters to them, and how much of the setup you want done for you. Take them in turn. Each one maps to something the published tiers actually hand over, so you can answer it without guessing.

Your money buys standard SMTP and IMAP mailboxes and browser webmail for the people who use them. It also buys the warm-up and authentication checks that sit alongside setup. That is the substance of the purchase: working mailboxes you can sign into, configure in a client, and send from during a test.

Nothing in the tiers supplies the people you write to. A mailbox is a sending and receiving tool, not a list of prospects, so your test audience comes from your own research. Anything outside the mailbox count is priced on its own, which means the published table should be read in full before money changes hands.

Three lifetime tiers exist, divided by mailbox count: Starter at five mailboxes, Studio at fifteen, and Floor at fifty. The division is the whole structure. There is no separate feature ladder to compare, so your question becomes simple: how many people on the team need to send and receive during the test?

Take Starter first. Five mailboxes covers a founder plus a couple of people doing outreach, with room to spare for a shared address. For a startup that has not yet had its first reply, this is the tier that matches the work in front of you. Fifteen and fifty exist for when the sending group grows.

Moving up a tier adds mailboxes, not contacts and not reach. Studio suits a team where several people each handle their own conversations. Floor suits a larger sending group. If your test involves two people and a shared inbox, the larger counts describe a stage you have not reached yet.

The doubt is real and worth naming: you do not want to sign an annual contract before a single reply lands. The tiers here are lifetime tiers by mailbox count rather than renewable annual agreements, and that changes the shape of the risk. You are choosing a count of mailboxes, and the published table tells you what each count includes.

What the purchase does not settle is whether your message resonates. The warm-up and authentication checks help the setup side of sending, but they do not decide whether a human writes back. Your test is the only thing that answers that, and no tier size changes the answer.

So separate the two questions. The commercial one is how many mailboxes you need, and the smallest tier answers it while your test is small. The marketing one is whether outreach works at all, and that is answered by sending a modest number of messages to people you chose yourself and reading what comes back, or does not.

Upgrading is a mailbox-count decision, not a feature decision. When a second or third person needs their own sending identity, or when a shared address is being used by too many people at once, the next count starts to make sense. Until then, staying on the smaller tier loses you nothing that the tiers describe.

Watch for the honest signals rather than the flattering ones. Replies per person, how many conversations one mailbox can carry, and whether someone is waiting on an address they cannot have. Those are the moments when the count, not the tooling, is holding your work back.

Do not upgrade in anticipation of a volume you have not seen. The larger tiers describe a sending group that already exists. If your test is still producing thin results, more mailboxes will not repair the message, and the decision to move up can wait until the team genuinely needs the seats.