If you’ve ever run cold email at any scale, you already know the dirty secret: the mailboxes cost a fortune. Buying Google Workspace or Zoho seats just to burn them on outreach campaigns adds up fast. So when I came across Relay — a service selling “fairly priced burner mailboxes” for as little as a dollar a month — I wanted to see whether it actually holds up for serious outreach. Here’s my hands-on review.
Relay (userelay.app) is a cold-outreach email infrastructure service that provides affordable “burner” mailboxes for bulk sending. It was built by an agency with years of cold outreach experience, and the whole premise is cost and deliverability: spin up mailboxes cheaply, get them pre-configured for inbox placement, and plug them straight into your sending software. After a short onboarding, Relay sends you a CSV of mailbox credentials ready to bulk-import into tools like Instantly or Lemlist.
If you’re sending across many mailboxes to protect deliverability, the per-mailbox savings versus Google/Zoho stack up quickly at scale.
At roughly $1 per mailbox, early-stage founders can test outbound without blowing the budget on email seats.
Relay hands you a CSV built for bulk import into the popular sending tools, so setup is fast if you already live in those platforms.
If you just want a single professional mailbox for normal business email, a standard Google Workspace or Zoho account is the right call.
Burner mailboxes are built for volume sending. If your compliance posture requires only warmed, first-party domains, weigh that carefully.
This is the headline. Relay says you can create mailboxes as cheap as $1 per month — a fraction of what services like Google and Zoho charge per seat. That cost difference is the entire reason the tool exists.
After a simple onboarding where you tell Relay which domains to use, they create your mailboxes and send all credentials within 24 hours. No manual DNS marathon on your end.
Every Relay mailbox is SPF, DKIM and DMARC compliant out of the box. Those three authentication standards are what keep your mail out of spam folders, and having them pre-configured is a real time-saver.
You receive a CSV of credentials designed for bulk import into your favorite outreach software — Instantly, Lemlist, Smartlead, Apollo and Mailshake are all in their compatibility lineup.
Relay is built around very low per-mailbox pricing — the site advertises mailboxes as cheap as $1 per month, with tiered plans sized for different volumes (5x, 50x and more). Because exact plan totals depend on how many mailboxes you need, I’d point you to the live site for the current plan breakdown rather than quote a single figure here. The takeaway: it’s positioned as a fraction of the cost of standard email seats.
Pros: Extremely cheap per mailbox; SPF/DKIM/DMARC pre-configured; fast 24-hour delivery of credentials; CSV built for popular outreach tools; built by people who actually run cold email.
Cons: Purpose-built for cold/bulk outreach rather than everyday business email; you hand over domains during onboarding; exact plan pricing isn’t a flat single number, so you need to size your volume first.
Google Workspace and Zoho give you full-featured, reputable mailboxes — but at per-seat prices that make large outreach setups expensive, and they’re not designed to be burned. Relay flips that: bare-bones mailboxes optimized purely for cold sending at a fraction of the cost, delivered ready-to-import. If you want one professional inbox, use Google or Zoho. If you need 50 sending mailboxes for campaigns, Relay’s economics are hard to beat.
For agencies and founders whose cold-email costs are dominated by mailbox seats, Relay makes a lot of sense — cheap, authentication-ready mailboxes delivered in a day and built for the tools you already use. It’s a specialist product, not a general email host, so judge it on that basis. If outbound volume is your game, the cost savings alone make it worth testing.
It provides low-cost burner mailboxes for cold email outreach, pre-configured for deliverability and ready to import into sending software.
The site advertises mailboxes as cheap as $1 per month, with tiered plans for higher volumes.
After onboarding, Relay creates your mailboxes and sends all credentials within 24 hours.
Relay provides a CSV for bulk import into tools like Instantly, Lemlist, Smartlead, Apollo and Mailshake.
Every mailbox is SPF, DKIM and DMARC compliant out of the box to help maximize inbox placement.
You can pick a plan and start your onboarding here: Get Started With Relay →
Affiliate disclosure: This post contains an affiliate link. If you sign up through it, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. All opinions are my own and based on the publicly available product information. Always follow applicable anti-spam laws and platform rules when running cold email.
