Nearly every shared inbox on the market bills you per person. We bill for the mail. Put your own numbers in and see what the difference comes to, against the published prices of the tools you’re probably weighing us against.
Everyone who reads or replies, not just full-time agents.
Sent and received across every shared mailbox.
Mail, search index and attachments together.
5,000 emails at 2¢, plus 10 GB of storage over the included 5 GB. Seats are free.
Competitor figures are their published list prices per user per month on annual billing, as of August 2026. They change, so check the current number with the vendor before you decide anything. What’s in and out of these figures
A comparison you can’t check isn’t worth much, so here is exactly what goes into both sides of it.
| Tool | Model | Published range | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Team Mail Manager | Per email handled | 2¢ an email, free seats | Free for teams of 2. Every feature on every account. |
| Front | Per seat | $25 to $105 / user / month | Several AI features are sold as paid add-ons on lower tiers. |
| Zendesk Suite | Per seat | $55 to $115 / user / month | AI agents and advanced add-ons are billed separately. |
| Intercom | Per seat | $29 to $132 / user / month | Per-seat price is on top of per-resolution AI charges. |
| Help Scout | Per seat | $25 to $75 / user / month | Also sold on a contacts-handled basis, which prices differently. |
| Freshdesk | Per seat | $15 to $79 / user / month | Bot sessions and field service are chargeable extras. |
| Hiver | Per seat | $19 to $79 / user / month | Built for Gmail; Outlook support varies by plan. |
Published list prices as of August 2026, on annual billing, taken from each vendor’s own pricing page: front.com/pricing, zendesk.com/pricing, intercom.com/pricing, helpscout.com/pricing, freshworks.com/freshdesk/pricing, hiverhq.com/pricing. All product names are trademarks of their owners, none of whom are affiliated with or endorse Team Mail Manager. We describe our own product and quote their public prices, nothing more.
When each login is $65 a month, somebody has to justify every one. The warehouse, the part-timer and the director who “just wants to look sometimes” don’t get one, so mail gets forwarded around the tool you bought to stop mail being forwarded around.
Seat counts follow headcount, not workload. A quiet quarter costs you exactly what a frantic one does, and the renewal conversation starts from the number of people you hired.
Most of these tools are broad customer-communication platforms: SMS, chat, social, marketplaces. Genuinely useful if you need them. If your work arrives as email, you’re buying nine-tenths of a platform to use one-tenth of it.
We won’t put words in anyone else’s mouth. Their answers depend on the plan you’re quoted, so the right-hand column is questions, not claims.
| Area | Team Mail Manager | Worth asking any vendor |
|---|---|---|
| Channels | Email only, done thoroughly. Every feature is built around a mail thread rather than a generic “conversation object”. | How much of the multi-channel platform will you actually use, and are you paying for the rest? |
| Mail connection | Microsoft 365 via Graph with a single tenant-wide admin consent. No forwarding rules, no MX changes, no new mailbox to create. | How are your mailboxes connected, and what address does the customer see on the reply? |
| Handing work between teams | Transfer moves ownership to another team while the thread keeps the mailbox it arrived on, so the customer’s next reply follows it into its new home instead of starting a new thread. | What happens to reply routing and the customer’s thread when a conversation moves between shared inboxes? |
| Cross-team help without a handover | Share loops another team in without giving up ownership. Shared threads live in a dedicated “Shared with me” view, and sharing is what makes that team mentionable on the thread. | Can another team read and reply to a thread you still own, and how is that access recorded? |
| Manager layer | Managers are appointed per inbox: live team presence, open queue counts, and scoped control of that inbox’s tags, rules, SLA targets and reports, with no account-wide admin rights. | Who can edit rules and see analytics, and which plan tier is that on? |
| Reporting | SLA (met, late, pending, p50 and p90), workload over time with a busiest-hours heatmap, per-agent medians, and open-backlog age bands. Included with every account. | Which analytics are on your tier, and how much history is retained? |
| Automation | Ordered rules on sender, recipient, subject and attachments that tag, assign, close or bin on arrival, global or scoped to one inbox. | Are there limits on rules or workflow steps per plan? |
| Structured data | Eight custom field types including single- and multi-select, global or per inbox, and filterable from the inbox list. | Are custom fields available on your tier, and how many? |
| Search | Full-text across subjects, bodies, addresses and filenames, plus the text extracted from PDFs, Word documents and spreadsheets. | Is the content inside attachments searchable, or only the filename? |
| Packaging | One product, all features. There is no tier that withholds reporting, rules or custom fields. | Which of the features you were shown in the demo are on the plan you’ve been quoted? |
| Price | Usage-based: free for teams of 2, then $20 per 1,000 emails sent and received. Never per seat. | What does the quote come to per year once everyone who touches the inbox has a licence, and which AI features are paid add-ons on top? |
| Deployment | Our multi-tenant platform, or a dedicated single-tenant instance where your policy requires it. | Is a dedicated or region-specific deployment available, and at what commitment? |
Your mail lives in Microsoft 365, not in whichever tool sits in front of it, which makes this less dramatic than it sounds.
Being straight with you: we don’t import history out of your current tool today. If a full archive migration is a hard requirement, tell us on the first call and we’ll say plainly whether we can meet it.
They’re each vendor’s published list price for a per-user plan on annual billing, recorded in August 2026 and shown with the plan name so you can check them. Prices move and discounts get negotiated, so treat the calculator as a starting point and confirm the real number in your quote, including any add-ons, minimum seat counts and onboarding fees, which we deliberately leave out.
Because price is the part we can state about someone else’s product without guessing. Feature comparisons written by a vendor about a rival age badly and flatter the author. The table above says what we do, and gives you the questions to put to anyone else.
It’s the same gamble your workload already is, and it cuts both ways: a quiet month costs less, which a seat count never does. If your volume is consistently large, talk to us about volume pricing. That conversation starts from these numbers.
Then usage pricing helps you most. A 40-person team handling 3,000 emails a month pays $60 with us and free seats for everyone; on a $65-a-seat plan the same team is $2,600. The wider the gap between headcount and mail volume, the bigger the difference.
Then the gap narrows, and at extreme volumes a per-seat plan can win. The calculator will show you that honestly rather than hiding it. Put your real numbers in. If we’re the more expensive option for you, we’d rather you found out here than three months in.
Not today. The mail integration is built for Microsoft 365. If you’re on Google, several of the tools above will serve you better right now, and we’d rather tell you that than waste your evaluation.
We don’t do them, and we’re not planning to pretend otherwise. If those channels are central to how your customers reach you, a multi-channel platform is the right purchase, and worth its per-seat price.
No. SLA, workload, agent performance and backlog reports are part of the product, on every account. So are rules, custom fields, tags and cross-team sharing.
Tell us your monthly mail volume and team size and we’ll tell you the bill to the cent, and what you’re paying today for comparison.