I’ve been paying for Google Workspace for years. Not because I needed it. Not really. It just sat there, month after month, quietly billing me for features I never opened.
It was one of those subscriptions that survives not because it earns its place, but because cancelling it always feels like a task for another day.
Well. Another day finally came.
If you caught episode 08 of my audio journal, you already know I went through a full subscription audit.
No drama, just a quiet reckoning with what I was actually using versus what I was just keeping around out of habit or vague future-proofing. Google Workspace was one of the casualties.
I want to be honest about the irony here: I’m trying to reduce my dependence on Google products, but I’m simultaneously going full speed on YouTube. I know.
That tension is real, and I’m not pretending it isn’t. But email felt like a clean, concrete place to start pulling back. So I did.
The replacement question
Cancelling was easy. The harder part was figuring out what came next, because I still need custom domain emails. A few of them, actually.
I went back and forth for a while before landing on a combination that surprised me with how well it works: iCloud Mail for my secondary domains, Spacemail for the one that really matters.
Odd combination, maybe. But hear me out.
iCloud Mail: the underused gem hiding in plain sight
I’ve been an Apple and Mac user for as long as I can remember. My entire productivity stack runs on Apple apps, with a few exceptions.
And yet, for years, I completely overlooked what iCloud actually offers when it comes to custom domain email.
If you’re already paying for any iCloud+ plan, even the cheapest one, you can connect up to five custom domains to your iCloud account at no additional cost.
Not as a trial. Not with caveats buried in small print. It’s just there, included, waiting to be used.
So I did exactly that. I had a handful of domains that didn’t have active websites but still needed working email addresses.
Rather than paying a separate monthly fee per domain, I connected them all to iCloud Mail. Done. They flow straight into Apple Mail on my Mac, alongside everything else.
For personal email or lighter-use addresses, this setup is genuinely good. The Mail app on macOS is underrated.
Clean, fast, no algorithmic noise, no ads, no over-the-top “smart” inbox that hides things from you. It just works the way email is supposed to work.
If you’re already paying for iCloud storage and you’re running an Apple-first setup like mine, there’s almost no reason not to use this for domains that don’t need serious business infrastructure behind them.
Spacemail: the new one worth watching
My primary email, the one attached to my main domain, I didn’t want sitting in iCloud. I wanted it to be separate. Independent.
That’s where Spacemail comes in.
Spacemail is built by Spaceship, which launched a few years ago as a next-generation registrar.
It’s connected to Namecheap but operates as its own platform, built from the ground up with a cleaner interface and a faster onboarding experience.
I’d been watching Spaceship since it launched, and when they rolled out their email service, I got curious.
What I found was an email product that does exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. Spacemail’s whole pitch is what you might call “lean professionalism”:
A standalone, high-performance email environment rather than a premium ecosystem that pressures you into Docs, Sheets, and Drive as well. That resonated immediately.
The setup was fast. Their Unbox™ feature lets you link a subscription to a domain in a single click, and for IMAP/SMTP/POP3 access, it just connects.
No manual DNS record hunting. I plugged it into Apple Mail in about ten minutes. That was it.
Security is covered. 2FA is standard, emails can be password-protected, and there’s built-in anti-tracking that strips tracking pixels from incoming marketing emails.
That last one is small but meaningful to me. I don’t love the idea of every newsletter sender knowing when I opened something, where I was, and how many times I re-read it.
They also added native iOS and Android apps recently, plus a built-in calendar, so if you want a more complete communication setup without stitching together five different tools, it’s heading in that direction.
And the price. I’m paying under a dollar a month. For a proper custom domain email with real security features, no ads, and no upsell pressure.
For context: Google Workspace was costing me multiples of that for features I wasn’t touching.
It’s more for me than beyond the price
The honest version of why I made this switch isn’t really about saving money, though that’s a side effect. It’s about matching my setup to where I am today.
Ever since I shifted fully toward writing and content creation, my requirements have shrunk dramatically.
I don’t need shared drives, collaborative docs, video conferencing integrations, or team-wide admin tools. I need an email that works, privacy that isn’t an afterthought, and a setup that I can configure once and forget about.
This email setup is exactly that. Set and forget. iCloud handles the lighter stuff across multiple domains.
Spacemail holds the address that matters most. Both pipe into Apple Mail. Nothing is over-engineered.
And if things change down the line, and the content work grows into something that needs a team environment again, switching back to a more robust platform is always an option.
But I’m not building infrastructure for a version of my life that doesn’t exist yet.
For now, one less thing to think about. That’s enough.
You can find the full subscription audit that led to this decision in episode 08 of my audio journal
available on Spotify and everywhere else.