Your email address is costing you jobs

Nobody trusts a yahoo.com email address on a plumbing invoice. That's not me being a snob. That's Sal's son Nick, who sent quotes from nick.plumbing440 at yahoo for two years and wondered why half the new customers went quiet.

I sat with Sal over coffee and counted six estimate requests from that spring where the customer never called back. We can't prove the email address did it. But when Nick switched to nick@salsplumbing.com, the call-back rate changed within a month, and Sal noticed before I did.

A real email address on your own domain costs $7 a user per month. It's the cheapest trust you can buy. I pay for my own seat, $84 a year, and I'd pay it before I'd pay for a logo.

What it is, what it costs

Google Workspace is Gmail with your business name on it, plus Drive, Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and Meet. Four plans. Business Starter is $7 a user per month on the annual plan, or $8.40 month to month. Standard is $14, or $16.80 flexible. Plus is $22, or $26.40.

The annual plan is a one-year commitment billed monthly, and it saves about 16 percent. New customers get 20 percent off for the first few months and a 14-day free trial besides. Start with Business Starter. A shop with five people does not need $14 seats.

The catch is storage. Starter includes 30GB pooled per user. That's fine for email and invoices. It's small if you keep years of photos and scans in Drive. Standard jumps to 2TB per user.

There's an AI assistant called Gemini baked in now. Starter gets limited access. I've used it to draft maybe four emails. It's fine. It's not the reason to buy.

Setting it up for Nick

Sign up for the trial and enter the domain we already owned, salsplumbing.com.
Google asks you to prove the domain is yours. It gives you a TXT record to paste in your DNS panel. Five minutes.
Change the MX records to Google's mail servers. That's the switch that makes mail flow. Their checklist walks you through every registrar.
Create the users. Nick, Sal, one shared info@ address for quotes.
Send a test email from your phone in the parking lot. If it lands, you're done.

Total setup took about an hour, most of it waiting on DNS to catch up. The bill is $21 a month for three seats on annual, $252 a year. Sal grumbled exactly once and hasn't mentioned it since.

The meter number version

Proving your domain to Google confused Nick, so here's the plain version. When the electric company turns service on, they ask for the meter number. The meter number proves you actually control that house and not your neighbor's.

The TXT record is the meter number of your website. It lives in your DNS, which is the site's public record book. Google reads it, sees you control the property, and turns the mail on. No wiring, no ladder, just a string you paste where your domain lives.

Mail records are called MX records, and those are the actual pipes. Get those right and email works everywhere, on the phone, in the truck, at the counter.

What to know before you pay

Google killed the free version of this years ago, so every path costs something now. People still ask me for a workaround. I don't have a good one.

Support on Starter is thin. Documentation, forums, billing help. No phone tech. If you want a human fast, that's what the higher plans buy.

Prices have gone up over the years, a few dollars at a time, and they'll climb again. Budget the annual rate, not the promo rate. And count your seats honestly. Every inbox is $84 a year on Starter, and that shared quotes@ address counts like a person.

Worth it anyway. The spam filtering alone is better than anything I've self-hosted, claims to block more than 99.9% of phishing, and in Sal's case it caught a fake invoice scam in its first week. That email was dressed up to look like their supply house.

What to do Monday

Open the last three emails you sent customers and look at the address they came from. If it doesn't end in your domain, start the 14-day Workspace trial tonight and follow their setup checklist. Your address is on every quote, every invoice, every door hanger. Make it match the sign on the truck.