Gmail vs StartMail Comparison

Feature	Gmail Visit →	StartMail Visit →
Overview
Rating	5.4	6.4
Pricing	$0.00/moFree (15 GB shared) $7.00/moGoogle Workspace Business Starter (annual, after the first-year discount) Show billing detailsHide billing details Free (15 GB shared): Free Google Workspace Business Starter (annual, after the first-year discount): US$4.90 per user per month for the first 12 months on annual billing, then US$7.00	$4.99/moPersonal (annual) $6.99/moBusiness (annual) Show billing detailsHide billing details Personal (annual): $59.88/year Business (annual): $83.88/year
Free tier	Limited free tier Show detailsHide details 15 GB of storage shared across Gmail, Google Drive and Google Photos; the paid Google One and Workspace plans raise that ceiling.	Paid only
Established	2004	2013
Platforms	AndroidiOS	Not specified
Privacy
Jurisdiction	United States Show detailsHide details Google LLC, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, California 94043, is the controller named in Google's privacy policy. Google reports US national-security (FISA) requests separately from its global requests report, in ranges rather than exact counts.	Netherlands Show detailsHide details StartMail B.V., registered in Zeist, Netherlands. Servers are company-owned hardware in locked cabinets inside Dutch data centers — not third-party cloud infrastructure.
Independent security audit	None on record	None on record
Source code	Closed source	Closed source
Zero-access encryption	No	No
Intra-provider E2EE	No	No
External PGP	Not supported	Native
Past data breach	No	No
Telemetry	Always on	On unless you opt out
Features
Hosting	Cloud	Cloud
Custom domain support	No	Yes
Aliases	Limited	Unlimited
Anti-spam approach	AI-powered filtering Google says stops more than 99.9% of spam, phishing and malware, plus sender-authentication requirements for bulk senders that Google says cut unauthenticated messages 75%. Google's privacy policy lists 'email you write and receive' among the content it collects, and with smart features on Google uses Gmail data to provide those features; Google states Gmail content is not used for ads personalization.	Personal, per-user Bayesian spam filter (SpamAssassin) trained by the user marking mail as spam or not; the training data is stored inside that user's own encrypted vault rather than pooled across the service.
Bundled services	Google DriveGoogle Photos	Not specified