Every builder wants to sell you a mailbox for $6 or $7 a seat, and it is the easiest line on the invoice to cut. Your domain name and email do not have to sit in the same place as the website, they never did. Three options I use, cheapest first.
1: plain forwarding, free. Cloudflare Email Routing or ImprovMX takes [hello@theirdomain.com](mailto:hello@theirdomain.com) and drops it into an existing Gmail. Sending as that address still means wiring an SMTP relay into Gmail, which is where most people give up. Fine for a one person business that mostly receives.
2: Zoho Mail, about $1 a user a month on the annual Lite plan, $4 if they want IMAP and the desktop apps. Real mailboxes, real webmail, and the free tier still exists for a single domain if you go looking for it. The interface feels like 2016 and support is slow, but for a two person shop it is the value pick.
3: Google Workspace Business Starter, $7 a user a month on annual, $8.40 if they want to stay month to month. Nobody has to be taught how to use it, which is worth the extra six dollars on its own with a client who would otherwise call me.
Setup is the same handful of MX records for all three, pasted into whatever DNS panel the domain lives in, plus the SPF and DKIM records the provider hands you. Fifteen minutes, and mail usually flows within the hour.
The real gotcha is where the domain sits. If it is parked inside a builder like Squarespace or Wix, their DNS panel sometimes hides MX editing behind a support chat. Move the DNS somewhere neutral before you promise anybody email.
Source: r/WebsiteStarters · by /u/Flashy8-8