Professional email on your own domain, for $0 a month

When you register a domain for your new business, the first thing you want is email that matches it. Nothing says “we just started” like a Gmail address on a business card.

The standard advice is to buy Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace immediately. Both are excellent, and if you’re already invoicing clients, they’re worth every dollar. But if you’re in the early stage where the brand exists before the revenue does, there’s a completely free setup that looks identical from the outside.

What you end up with

Receiving: mail sent to you@yourcompany.com (plus info@, hello@, support@) lands in the inbox you already use.
Sending: you reply from your existing inbox, and the recipient sees you@yourcompany.com, properly authenticated with SPF and DKIM, so it doesn’t land in spam.
Cost: $0 per month. The only spend is your domain registration.

The ingredients

Cloudflare Email Routing (free), receives mail for your domain and forwards it to any inbox.
A free SMTP relay such as Brevo (300 emails/day on the free tier) lets your existing inbox send as your domain.
Four DNS records, three MX records and one TXT (SPF), plus the DKIM records your relay gives you.

The gotchas that cost us an hour

A few things the tutorials don’t tell you:

The service isn’t live until every DNS record exists, including the DKIM record, which is easy to miss. If the status says “disabled”, compare the records the dashboard expects against the ones actually in your DNS zone.
Only one SPF record is allowed per domain. If your relay and your routing service each want one, merge them into a single record with two include: entries.
Email DNS records must not be proxied. If your DNS provider offers a proxy toggle, keep mail-related records set to DNS-only.
Verification emails can be casualties. If a confirmation code was sent before routing worked, it’s gone, request a new one after everything is green.

When to graduate

This setup carries a business comfortably through its brand-building phase. The moment you have paying clients, move to Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace: you’ll want calendars, storage, and support behind your email. The nice part is that the migration is just a change of MX records, the address on your business card never changes.

This is exactly the setup Altanetrix runs on today. If you’d like help putting it in place for your business, or deciding whether it’s time to graduate, get in touch.