Email Hosting in Singapore: The Three Real Options

Business email on your own domain is sold three ways in Singapore, and they are not three versions of one product. A web host will sell you mailboxes. Google sells Google Workspace, and Microsoft sells Microsoft 365. The first of those sells you addresses; the other two sell you accounts, and an account brings file storage and the rest of a suite with it.

Count people before you compare prices, not email addresses. That is the step that changes the sum. A three-person business that also wants info@, sales@ and billing@ is looking at six addresses, and on a per-mailbox plan each of those is another mailbox on the bill. On Google Workspace they are not. Google’s admin help says you can “add up to 30 email aliases for each user at no extra cost”. An alias is a second address that lands in an existing mailbox. So three mailboxes and three users were never the same purchase, and lining the two up side by side makes the cheap plan look cheaper than it is.

Prices here were checked on 5 September 2026, two of them on the vendor’s own Singapore page and Google’s in its global admin help. Two of the three are quoted in Singapore dollars and one in US dollars. The four vendor pages behind those figures do not answer the goods and services tax question the same way either. GST is the 9 per cent Singapore adds to most sales: two of the pages print that it goes on top, one prices in US dollars and says the tax is not in the number, and one prints no tax note against its Singapore dollar figures at all.

Email hosting and web hosting are two separate purchases

Worth settling first, because most of the confusion in this decision lives here.

Web hosting is where your website’s files sit. Email hosting is where your mail sits. Hosting packages often carry both, which in our own work is what makes them look like one product. Buy a package with a domain and mailboxes may well be included at no visible extra cost. If that is where your mail lives now, the hosting package made this decision rather than you.

A host will also sell you mailboxes on their own, with no website attached, and both of the priced examples below are that kind of product. So the bundle is one way to buy this option rather than the whole of it. The difference matters later, because the risk this piece raises near the end belongs to the bundled case.

The three options, side by side

Two Singapore hosts are used here as the priced examples of the mailbox option, because both publish their rates and both state their tax treatment on the page. They are examples of the shape, not a shortlist.

Two cells in the Microsoft column are left open on purpose. Microsoft’s Singapore product page carries the prices, the tax line and the storage figure. It says nothing about extra addresses or a sending cap, and this guide does not go past that page for Microsoft. An open cell is more use to you than a number with nothing behind it.

For the suite comparison itself, feature against feature, our comparison of Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 is the piece that does that job. This one is about the third option that comparison does not carry.

The three prices are not quoted on the same basis

Currency, tax and unit all differ, and the three vendors’ pages do not answer the tax question in the same way.

The two Singapore hosts price in Singapore dollars and add GST. CLDY prints, at the foot of its email hosting page: “All prices are in Singapore Dollars (SGD). 9% GST applies to Singapore customers only.” Exabytes prints: “GST No. 201014969M | All Prices are subject to 9% GST.” Both are clear. Take the number on the card, add 9 per cent, and that is what the vendor charges you. Whether that 9 per cent is a cost to your business is the next section.

Microsoft prices in US dollars on its Singapore pages, and says the tax is not in the number. Its Business Basic page carries “Microsoft 365 Business Basic USD$7.00 user/month, paid yearly (Annual subscription-auto renews)” and, beneath every plan card on that page, “Price does not include GST.” So a Singapore buyer reading that page is looking at a figure in a foreign currency with the tax still to come.

Google’s admin-help page carrying the Singapore dollar figures makes no tax note against them at all. The figures are in Google’s admin help, on the page comparing the two payment plans, in the currency table under each edition: the SGD row reads $11.2 and $9.4 for Business Starter. That page says nothing about GST against those figures either way. It does mark its Japanese yen figures “exclusive of 10% JCT, which is added to the price”, so the page does carry tax notes where it has them to give. Read the Singapore rows as figures to confirm on your own invoice rather than as tax-inclusive or tax-exclusive.

So a reader holding CLDY’s “S$5 /MO” against Microsoft’s “USD$7.00 user/month” is not comparing like with like on currency, on tax, or on what one unit buys. Three things differ at once, and only one of them is the price.

Who actually pays the 9 per cent

This section is about Singapore tax rules that apply to your business, and the honest answer ends with your accountant rather than with us. What follows is what IRAS publishes, with links, so you know which question to ask. Its pages were checked on 5 September 2026.

The rate is 9 per cent. IRAS, the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore, states it plainly on its current GST rates page: “The current GST rate in Singapore is 9%.”

Buying from overseas does not automatically put the purchase outside GST, and which rule applies depends on your own registration. IRAS publishes the rule for buyers who are not registered, on its page on purchasing remote services from overseas service providers: “If you are a consumer (i.e., non-GST registered customer) in Singapore, you must pay GST on all remote services – digital or non-digital, when purchased from GST-registered overseas service providers.” The same page adds that “Only GST-registered providers are authorised to charge and collect GST from consumers in Singapore.” Its examples of remote services include “Electronic data management services (e.g. website hosting and cloud storage)”, and it does not name email hosting among them.

For buyers who are registered, a different regime applies, and IRAS sets it out on a separate page for local businesses importing services. Both pages are short and worth reading before you take anybody’s word for it, this page included.

That is also why a foreign vendor’s page can show a price with no tax on it. IRAS says so directly: “As most of the GST-registered overseas service providers operate in a global market, it may not be feasible for them to display prices inclusive of Singapore GST on their websites or online stores.” And what happens after they work out where you are: “Once the GST-registered provider has ascertained that Singapore GST is chargeable, the price that they charge you will be inclusive of GST.” The billing address you type in is part of how they decide, and IRAS treats giving false information “to avoid paying GST” as a serious offence.

There is a third possibility, and for a registered business it is the useful one. IRAS, on that second page: “If you are a GST-registered business purchasing remote services or low-value goods from a GST-registered overseas vendor, you need to provide your GST registration number to the vendor so that the vendor will not charge you GST on your business purchases.” So for some buyers the question is not how to recover the 9 per cent but whether it should be on the invoice at all.

Whether that 9 per cent is a cost, something you recover, or something you are not charged, depends on your own GST position. On the same page, IRAS describes what it calls the reverse charge mechanism: “the GST-registered recipient of the imported services or low-value goods, accounts for GST on those services or goods as if he were the supplier. Concurrently, he may claim the GST as his input tax subject to the normal input tax recovery rules.”

Read the conditions rather than the headline. Recovery is “subject to the normal input tax recovery rules”; IRAS attaches that passage to registered businesses “not entitled to full input tax credit”; and its wording excepts “services specifically excluded from the scope of reverse charge”. Which of those describes your business is not something a hosting comparison can tell you.

Put the question to whoever does your books, in these words: on this subscription, is the GST a cost to us, an input tax we recover, or something we should not be charged at all? The answer does not change which mailbox is better. It changes whether the 9 per cent belongs in the comparison at all, and that is worth two minutes of an accountant’s time before you sign anything annual. They are also the right person to tell you whether your business needs to be registered for GST at all.

Three mailboxes and three users were never the same thing

If your business wants info@ for enquiries, sales@ for quotes, maybe billing@ or support@, then on a plan sold by the mailbox every one of those is a mailbox, and the plan you need is the next size up.

On Google Workspace they are free. From Google’s admin help page on adding an alternate email address, which carries its own stamp reading “Last updated 2026-08-21 UTC”: “You can add up to 30 email aliases for each user at no extra cost.” Google’s own worked example on that page is a one-person business running info@, billing@ and sales@ off a single account.

Mail sent to an alias arrives in the existing mailbox. Replying from that address is a separate step, and Google is specific about who does it: “To send email from an alias, the user must set up a custom From address in Gmail. This task is done by the user and is not visible to you in the Admin console.” So an administrator cannot switch it on for somebody else.

The limits matter as much as the allowance. Three of them will decide whether an alias is the right answer for you.

• “Multiple users can’t share an email alias.” One person receives the mail. Google adds that “multiple users can send email from an alias if they set up a custom From address”, so sending and receiving are not the same permission. A shared enquiries inbox that three people work through at once is a different setup, not an alias.
• “Email aliases are not Google Accounts, so you can’t sign in with an email alias address and access Google services, like Google Drive.” An alias has no login and no storage of its own.
• An alias does not come with its own sending allowance. Google’s Gmail sending limits page lists “Messages sent from a user’s alternate address, or alias” among the messages that count toward a user’s own limits, so 30 aliases share the one daily cap rather than adding to it.

So the comparison worth doing is people against people, with aliases doing the work of the extra addresses.

The mailbox plan is still cheaper here, and by a wide margin. That is the honest result and it should be said plainly: if what you want is six addresses that send and receive mail, a Singapore host will sell you that for a little over a third of the price of three Workspace accounts. The alias rule does not close that gap. What it does is stop the gap being overstated, which is what happens when a three-mailbox plan is compared against three licences as though they were the same goods.

One caution on that S$10.00. CLDY prints it as “FROM S$10 /MO”, so it is a floor rather than a fixed rate, and the gap above is the widest the two options can be rather than the exact one you will be quoted.

The rest of the difference is what the licence carries beyond the mailbox: file storage in a shared pool, the applications the suite comes with, and one company account an administrator manages centrally rather than six unconnected mailboxes. Whether that is worth S$18.20 a month to your business is a real question with a real answer either way.

5 GB of mailbox is not 30 GB of pooled storage

Storage numbers look like the easiest thing to compare on this list. They are not, because the two sides are measuring different goods.

A host sells you mailbox storage, fixed per box. CLDY’s plan cards read “Storage 5 GB each” on its CloudMail plans and “25 GB each” on Cloud Business Mail. Exabytes prints “25GB Storage per user”. That space holds mail.

Google sells pooled storage, which means one shared allowance for the whole company rather than a fixed amount each. Its storage FAQ for admins, stamped “Last updated 2026-08-26 UTC”, gives Business Starter as “30 GB times the number of End Users, including Archived Users”, and explains the pooling: “Pooled storage is shared storage for all your users. This storage includes, but is not limited to, files from Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos.”

Two consequences follow, and they pull in opposite directions.

• The pool is shared, so one person with a heavy mailbox draws on the same space as everyone else. Three Business Starter users have 90 GB between them, not 30 GB each, though not on day one: the same page says pooled storage “is granted in stages”, that “Your storage increases to your total storage limit after you make a $30 USD payment for your subscription”, and that “It can take up to 72 hours after a payment for your storage to increase”.
• The pool is not mail only. Files and photos come out of the same 90 GB, so a team that keeps its documents in Drive is buying storage for two jobs with one number.

Set 5 GB of mailbox against 30 GB of pooled storage in one row of a spreadsheet and the second looks six times bigger. It is a different thing, doing more jobs, shared differently. We have written up how the pooled storage limit actually works separately, because it catches people after they buy rather than before.

Both sides cap how much you can send

CLDY and Google both cap outgoing mail, and each publishes its cap in a different unit. Neither is converted here, because the two are measured differently.

• CLDY, per hour. From its own FAQ: “CLDY has an email sending limit on a per-hour basis to ensure top deliverability for mail hosting clients. The limit varies according to packages, eg. CloudMail3 comes with 200 outgoing emails per hour.”
• Google Workspace, per day. Its Gmail sending limits page, stamped “Last updated 2026-08-26 UTC”, gives a daily sending limit per user account of 2,000 messages, “1,500 for mail merge” and “500 for trial accounts”, and a separate limit of 3,000 external recipients per day.

This matters to one kind of business in particular: the one that sends invoices, statements or a newsletter in a batch. If that is you, read your own plan’s number before you buy rather than after the first batch stalls. And if you send marketing email in volume, that belongs on a mailing platform rather than on your business mailbox, whichever of these three you pick.

The question to ask before you leave mail with your web host

This part is our own view rather than a vendor fact, and it applies only if you buy the two together.

When your web host is also your mail host, one account holds both. One overdue invoice, one control panel someone gets into, one move to a new host done in a hurry, and your email is inside the same event as your website. Mail is the one that hurts: a site being down for a day is visible and fixable, and a mailbox that stops receiving is a quote you never knew arrived.

Our advice to our own clients is to keep the two apart once email is carrying real business. That is our practice, and it is why our free guide on moving email off shared hosting onto Google Workspace exists as a five-page PDF on the resources page rather than as a sales conversation.

The honest cost of splitting them, because it is not free. You get a second bill, a second admin console to learn, and an MX change to make correctly. MX is the setting in your domain’s DNS, the internet’s address book, that tells other mail servers which machine takes your domain’s mail. Get that wrong and mail stops arriving until it is fixed. For a one-person business whose email is a handful of messages a week, the bundle is a defensible choice and we would say so.

If you decide to move, the mechanics are written up in full in our guide to moving IMAP mailboxes to Google Workspace. IMAP is a standard mail programs use to read mail off a server, and it is one of the ways a host’s mailboxes are reached.

Whichever you buy, landing in the inbox is a separate job

Buying better email hosting does not on its own stop your mail going to spam. That is decided by three records in your domain’s DNS: SPF lists the servers allowed to send for your domain, DKIM signs each outgoing message so a receiver can check the signature against a key you publish, and DMARC tells the receiving server what to do with anything that fails those checks. All three are set at your domain rather than by your mail plan, so switching provider without setting them up moves the problem rather than fixing it.

Our resources page carries a free guide to SPF, DKIM and DMARC for Google Workspace, in the order to set them up. It is three pages and there is no form to fill in.

Which one to buy

Answer three questions in this order and the choice usually makes itself.

1. How many people, and how many addresses? Count people first, then decide which extra addresses are aliases on a person’s account and which genuinely need their own mailbox or a shared inbox. This is the number that decides everything else.
2. Is mail all you need, or shared files too? If the business already runs on documents several people open, you are buying a suite whatever you call it, and mailbox plans are not competing for that job. If mail is genuinely all of it, they are, and they are cheaper than the Workspace rates priced above.
3. Where does your website live, and does that worry you? If your web host holds both, decide that deliberately rather than by default.

Mailboxes from a host suit a small team that wants addresses and nothing else, prices in Singapore dollars, and, if it buys them from its web host, does not mind that both sit in one account. The published rates are the lowest on this page by a distance.

Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 suit a business buying accounts rather than addresses, where people share files and somebody needs to administer those accounts centrally. Between those two, our advice is to decide on which applications your team already works in, which is what our guide to how the two suites compare feature by feature is for.

We license both suites, so we have no reason to push you at one over the other. The recommendation we actually give is the boring one: buy the unit that matches how your business works, and do not let a per-mailbox price decide a per-person question.

Common questions

Can I keep my domain and change email provider? Yes. Moving mail is a change to your domain’s MX records rather than a change of domain. The migration itself takes planning, which is what our IMAP migration guide covers.

Does 9 per cent GST apply to all three options? The two Singapore hosts quoted here say it does and print it on their pages. Microsoft’s Singapore page states “Price does not include GST.” Google’s admin-help page carrying the Singapore dollar figures makes no tax statement either way. IRAS’s rule on remote services from GST-registered overseas providers is quoted above, and whether you recover the GST depends on your own registration, which is a question for your accountant.

Is a cheap mailbox plan a false economy? Not automatically. It is a false economy when it is compared against a per-user licence as though the two sold the same thing. Priced as what it is, an address that sends and receives mail, it is the cheapest of the options priced here.

How many email addresses can one Google Workspace user have? Up to 30 aliases at no extra cost, per Google’s admin help. Only one user receives mail at an alias, aliases have no login of their own, and everything sent from them counts against that user’s own daily sending limit.

What is the sending limit on business email? It depends on the plan and the units differ. Google publishes 2,000 messages a day per user account for Google Workspace, and CLDY publishes 200 outgoing emails per hour on its CloudMail3 plan. Check your own plan’s published figure if you send in batches.

Where to start

Write down two numbers before you open any pricing page: how many people need an account, and how many addresses the business needs to answer. If the second is much larger than the first, aliases are doing work that a per-mailbox plan would charge you for, and the comparison you were about to run would have given you the wrong answer.

Then price the option that fits, and add the 9 per cent where the vendor says it is extra. Where a vendor’s page says nothing either way, confirm it on your first invoice.

If you would rather have somebody work through it with you, that is what we do. Our Google Workspace services page explains how we work, and Google Workspace pricing in Singapore sets out what each edition includes. Tell us how many people you have and what addresses the business answers, and we will tell you which of the three costs you least.