複数のGmailを切り替える: what the free tier covers

Nobody searches for the price of an account switcher out of curiosity. The search follows something: a storage warning on the account that holds five years of client mail, a quote for a business address on a custom domain, or a trial expiry notice from an app that was holding four inboxes in one window. The narrow answer is short. Running several Google accounts and moving between them costs nothing. The useful part is the three separate bills that sit around that zero, because they come from different places, they scale differently, and only one of them has anything to do with switching.

The switch itself carries no price

Google accounts are free to create. There is no charge for holding several at once, no charge for the account menu at the top right of every Google page, and no paid tier that unlocks faster movement between them. Nothing in that mechanism is a premium feature.

What makes the question feel expensive is that every wall people hit while using several accounts happens to have a payment page behind it. Storage runs out and a plan is offered. A business address is needed and a subscription appears. A tool that put four inboxes in one window ends its trial. Those three walls are unrelated to each other. Treating them as one budget line produces the wrong purchase, usually a subscription that solves a problem the buyer did not have.

Storage is the first bill, and it does not pool

Every Google account arrives with 15 GB, shared across Gmail, Drive and Photos. Three accounts therefore hold 45 GB in total, and that total is fiction for planning purposes, because the allowance is per account and nothing moves between them. When one account fills up, the empty space in the other two is unreachable. In practice one account is always the heavy one, usually the oldest or the one receiving attachments from clients.

Paid storage is priced in the currency of the billing country. The Japanese list, read from Google's own plans page, puts the 100 GB tier at 290 yen per month, the 2 TB tier at 1,450 yen, and the 5 TB tier at 2,900 yen, with annual billing advertised as saving up to 16 percent. A plan can be shared with up to five people, but that mechanism is a family group, not a way to lend capacity to a second account belonging to the same person.

The shape of this bill matters more than the number. It multiplies by accounts, not by people. Someone running three accounts that are all close to full is looking at three subscriptions, not one larger one. Anyone budgeting for this should count inboxes, then check which of them are actually near the limit, because usually only one is.

There is a cheaper move before the subscription, and it is worth an hour. Storage on a Gmail account is almost always consumed by attachments rather than by message text, and Gmail search accepts a size filter that lists the largest messages first. Clearing a few years of large attachments from the heavy account often drops it back under the ceiling for another year, at which point the paid tier becomes a decision rather than an emergency. The same hour also reveals whether the growth is steady or was caused by one project, which changes whether 100 GB is enough or whether the next tier is the honest answer.

A custom domain moves the bill to per user, per month

The second wall arrives when a second address needs to stop looking like a personal one. Sending from an address at a custom domain through Gmail is what Google Workspace is for, and it is billed per user per month rather than per mailbox in the loose sense people often assume.

The Japanese pricing page lists the annual plan at 800 yen per user per month for Business Starter, 1,600 yen for Business Standard, and 2,500 yen for Business Plus, with a one year commitment advertised as saving 16 percent and introductory discounts applied for the first months of a new subscription. Starter, Standard and Plus are sold for a maximum of 300 users. Storage on these plans is pooled per person at 30 GB on Starter, 2 TB on Standard and 5 TB on Plus.

The detail worth dwelling on is what counts as a user. A sole trader who wants two distinct business identities can either create two logins, which is two users and twice the monthly charge, or configure the second address as an alias on one login, which costs nothing extra but delivers both identities into a single inbox. That choice is really a question about whether the separation needed is of addresses or of inboxes, and answering it first can halve this line of the budget.

Container apps draw the free line at two accounts

The third bill comes from the category of applications that give each web app its own window. Free tiers are standard here, and the published limits converge on the same threshold from different directions.

Product	Free tier	Paid price	Trial and refund
Wavebox	2 groups, 2 apps in each, 1 extension, 1 dashboard	Pro at 8.33 dollars per month paid annually, Teams at 12.50 dollars per user per month	7 day Pro trial, 30 day money back guarantee
Rambox	Unlimited apps, up to 2 instances per app	Pro at 7 dollars per month or 70 dollars per year, Teams at 14 dollars per user from 5 users	30 day Pro trial, no credit card
Shift	5 Spaces, 10 apps per Space	Advanced at 199.99 dollars per year or 19.99 dollars per month	Annual billing saves 40 dollars
Ferdium	Open source, no imposed limits	Free	Not applicable

Wavebox states the threshold in plain language on its own pricing page:

Once your trial has ended you can continue to use Wavebox Basic with two groups and two spaces. So for example, you can stay signed-in to 2 gmail accounts, work and home. Source: wavebox.io

Rambox reaches the same ceiling by a different route, placing no limit on how many apps can be added while capping simultaneous logins at two instances per app. Shift counts differently again, offering five Spaces with ten apps in each on its free plan and moving unlimited Spaces and apps behind the paid tier. Ferdium, being open source, imposes no commercial limit at all and asks for setup effort instead.

Two accounts free, a payment from the third, is the pattern to plan around. Discounts exist outside it: Wavebox advertises 70 percent off for education and for non-profit teams, applied by starting a trial with a qualifying address and contacting support.

Trial length is the other variable and it is easy to underestimate. Wavebox starts new accounts on a seven day Pro trial and adds a thirty day money back guarantee behind the subscription. Rambox runs a thirty day Pro trial and asks for no card to begin it. Shift has no trial clock at all, since its free plan continues indefinitely. The gap between seven days and thirty matters because the question a trial answers is whether the arrangement survives one genuinely busy week, and a seven day window started at a quiet moment will expire before that week arrives.

The free route, stated as conditions

Putting the three bills side by side makes the zero cost path precise. It holds when the number of Gmail accounts in daily use is two or fewer, when no single account is near its 15 GB ceiling, and when every address involved can remain an ordinary gmail.com address. Meet all three and no payment is required.

Browser profiles sit inside that path and deserve more credit than they get in pricing comparisons. Chrome and Safari both create them at no cost, with no cap on how many, and each one holds its own cookies, history, saved passwords and extensions. That separation is enough to stop the two most common irritations of multi account life, which are session index shifts and accounts borrowing each other's cookies. Anyone about to pay for a container app should spend an afternoon on profiles first, because the cheaper fix sometimes removes the symptom entirely.

Knowing where profiles stop is what makes the later comparison fair. Profiles are managed as windows, so every additional account is another window to find, name and remember, and that bookkeeping stays with the person rather than the software. Notifications also remain unchanged, since macOS still sees one browser application regardless of how many profiles are open inside it. Paid products in this category are charging for those two things specifically: an account bound to a window rather than to a session, and an identity the operating system can see. Trying profiles first turns an abstract comparison into a short list of symptoms that survived the free option, and that list is what any price should be weighed against.

The conditions break in a predictable order. A third account is added, and it crosses the storage ceiling and the container app free tier at the same time. When estimating, count the inboxes expected next year rather than the ones open today, since the difference between two and three is where every free tier in this article ends.

One free arrangement has an expiry date

A long standing way of avoiding all three bills has been consolidation: pull a non-Google mailbox into one Gmail account and reply from that address, so there is only one inbox and nothing to switch between. Google has set an end date for that route. From January 2027 the ability to send from a third-party address inside Gmail ends, and Gmailify along with POP fetching from third-party accounts ends with it. New configurations of the feature are due to be restricted before that date, and adding or syncing a third-party account in Gmail on the web is already unavailable.

The exclusions are as important as the change. Aliases between Gmail addresses and the send-as function on Google Workspace accounts are explicitly unaffected. Third-party clients such as Outlook, Thunderbird and Apple Mail continue to reach Gmail over IMAP and POP, and the Gmail mobile app keeps its support for non-Google accounts.

The budgeting consequence is narrow but real. A setup where every address is a Gmail or Workspace address is untouched. A setup that routes a rented mailbox or a personal domain through a free Gmail account on the web has an expiry date attached, and whatever replaces it is likely to carry a monthly price where the old arrangement carried none.

What to change first

Identify which of the three bills is actually being asked about, because they solve different problems: storage is a data problem, Workspace is an identity problem, and a container app is an attention problem. Buying storage will not stop notifications blurring together, and buying a window per account will not create disk space. Once the category is clear, compare free tiers rather than monthly prices, since the line between two accounts and three decides the cost far more than the difference between seven and eight dollars. SpaceDeck publishes its own limits on the same basis, and Compared with Rambox sets the free tier boundaries of this category next to each other.