The Real Cost of Keeping Ex-Employee Mailboxes in Microsoft 365 / Google Workspace
Every time someone leaves, IT faces the same quiet decision: what do we do with their mailbox? For compliance, handover, or "we might need it," most companies keep it — and keep paying for it. That cost compounds silently with every departure. Here's the real math.
Every option today costs something
- Keep or suspend the seat. A suspended Google Workspace user still consumes a full paid licence; the same is true for keeping a Microsoft 365 seat assigned. You're paying active-user prices for someone who left.
- Google "Archived User" (AU) licence. Cheaper than an active seat (roughly $4–7/user/month depending on tier), but it's still a recurring per-user fee, forever, and it grows with every leaver. Source: Google Workspace AU licensing.
- Microsoft 365 "inactive mailbox." Historically free — but since January 2025 Microsoft charges for storage on inactive mailboxes held under retention or legal hold. The "free forever" assumption no longer holds. Source: Microsoft Learn — inactive mailboxes.
- Export to PST and delete the account. Free, but you're back to a dead file nobody can search — useless the day someone needs to actually find a message in it, and a discovery risk if you can't produce it.
A 50-person company with ~2-year average tenure pays for roughly 200 mailboxes over four years to serve 50 live people. Per-seat archiving cost scales with cumulative departures, not current headcount — which is why the bill keeps climbing even when headcount is flat. Third-party archives charge per active user, not per retained mailbox, so legacy mailboxes become nearly free.
What you actually need from a departed mailbox: it stays intact, it stays searchable, it's producible for compliance/e-discovery, and it doesn't keep charging you per head. That's the gap Evermail fills — move departed-employee mail off per-seat licences into searchable, compliant custody for a fraction of a live seat.
Stop paying to keep dead mailboxes alive.
Move departed-employee email off M365/Google licences into Evermail — fully searchable, compliant, for a fraction of a seat.
See the savings →