Plainmail vs Cloudflare Email Routing

Prices checked November 6, 2026

Cloudflare Email Routing is free forwarding: mail to hello@yourdomain lands in an inbox you already have. It doesn't store mail and has no mailbox to send from, so replies go out from your personal address unless you set up a separate sender. Plainmail is a real mailbox that sends and receives as hello@yourdomain, and it writes its records into Cloudflare DNS in one click.

Side by side

	Plainmail	Cloudflare Email Routing
Price	$5 a month, flat	Free
Receives mail	Yes, into a mailbox on your domain	Yes, forwarded to another address
Replies from your address	Yes, from any mail app, signed for your domain	No; you need a separate sending service or SMTP relay
Stores mail	Yes, 25 GB	No; mail lives wherever it's forwarded
DNS host	Any; one-click setup on Cloudflare	Cloudflare only
Works in mail apps	As its own IMAP/SMTP account	Through the inbox it forwards to
AI agent access	MCP server and REST API to read and send	Email Workers for custom code

When Cloudflare Email Routing is the better pick

You only need to receive mail on a domain, and replying from your personal address is fine.
You want custom processing in code with Email Workers.
You want to pay nothing.

When Plainmail is the better pick

You need to reply as hello@yourdomain, not from your personal Gmail.
You want each project's mail kept in its own mailbox instead of mixed into one inbox.
You don't want to set up and maintain a separate SMTP relay and its DKIM signing.

Switching to Plainmail

A domain's mail can only go to one place, so you use either Email Routing or Plainmail on each domain, not both.

Add the domain in Plainmail and create your addresses.
Disable Email Routing for that domain in the Cloudflare dashboard so its MX records are released.
Choose Connect with Cloudflare in Plainmail and approve the records. New mail arrives at Plainmail within minutes.

Get started$5 a month for up to 50 domains and 100 mailboxes