What email security monitoring costs for a small business

Straight answer: $2 per user per month with InboxGuards — $240 a year for a 10-person team. Here is the plain math versus MSP and SOC-style pricing, and what the subscription does not include.

The short answer: $2 per user per month

InboxGuards costs $2 per user per month — or $20 per user per year, which gets you 2 months free — with no minimum or setup fee. A 10-person business pays $240 a year, or $200 billed annually. That covers automated monitoring of supported Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace audit records at the fastest cadence available on standard plans — no premium security licensing required — email alerts with evidence, downloadable activity reports, and a printable monitoring record.

The first security scan is available before paid monitoring. Tenant changes and incident response remain with you or your authorized IT provider. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee under the published refund terms.

Plain math for a small team

Five people: about $10 per month, or $100 per year billed annually. Ten people: $20 per month, or $200 per year billed annually. Twenty people: $40 per month, or $400 per year billed annually. You pay for active seats being monitored; you can change seat counts from the dashboard under the subscription terms. That price is for a self-serve alarm — software that checks supported audit records and emails you — not for a human analyst watching screens overnight.

Compared with hiring an MSP or SOC

These categories perform different jobs and should not be treated as interchangeable. Manual review uses provider tools and requires assigned staff, a defined schedule, and documented response procedures; cost is mostly labor time. Monitoring and alerting software checks supported records and produces alerts; InboxGuards is in this category at $2 per user per month. Email security gateways filter message traffic and may provide other protections; capabilities vary by product and license. Managed security or SOC-style services may add human review or incident response under a separate scope, authorization model, contract, and price — often far above $2 per user when you are buying people, not just an alarm.

What you do NOT get in the $2 subscription

The monitoring subscription does not include hands-on tenant remediation, password resets performed by us, or a promise that every incident will be caught. InboxGuards deliberately does not sit between you and an attacker. You own the alerts and decide the response.

Hands-on remediation exists only as an optional, separately authorized $199 flat-fee service when you want help making tenant changes. That fee is not bundled into the monthly monitoring price and is not required to subscribe. InboxGuards also does not determine insurance eligibility, coverage, premium, or claim outcomes. Reports are monitoring records you can share with a broker; carriers decide underwriting on their own rules.

Why the price can stay at $2

The price is honest about what the service is: automated monitoring plus alerting, not a 24/7 human security operations center. Software checks your audit logs, applies detection rules for account-takeover behavior when supported records are available, and emails you when something needs attention, with plain-English general response guidance. Evaluate InboxGuards against monitoring scope, supported providers and events, alert and report features, contract, and refund terms. Do not buy it based on an assumed loss-prevention number or an insurance discount promise. See full pricing or start monitoring.

A 10-person pricing example

For a 10-person business: $240 per year, or $200 if billed annually. There is no onboarding fee, and new subscriptions have a 30-day money-back guarantee under the published refund terms. Setup requires customer-admin authorization for read-only access. Monitoring begins after a successful connection and scheduled check; your administrator or MSP remains responsible for tenant changes and incident response. That is the whole commercial story at $2 per user: an alarm on supported audit signals, not a bundled SOC retainer.