ImprovMX

Founders note: ImprovMX is a lot like Fly.io. It’s not the feature you think you want.

What ImprovMX is

I found this little gem when I realized I was too cheap to set up Google Workspace for every one of my domains that I purchased in the last couple years. I probably got like eight domains and I want email in all of them and I’m too lazy to pay $12 a month to get every one of them set up or even too cheap to pay for Google Workspace at all to get email. So I use Gmail and I stumbled across this because I can set up as many aliases I want and have all the mail delivered to my Gmail inbox. And if I go a little bit farther, I can set up SMTP. So not only can I receive anything coming into a domain, I can also have everything sent outbound. This is a power feature because this means I can harness multiple domains and do things with it that I wouldn’t have done.

The assumption trap — Workspace and GoDaddy

I think a lot of people have one or two primary domains, link that up to Google Workspace and think that they have to use either mail through GoDaddy, which is an absolute debacle, or mail through Gmail, which has a configuration problem and costs money. It’s a cost that no startup needs. No startup needs to spend 40-50 bucks on email just to get workspace. You can get it much cheaper, much faster. And you can harness all those other domains and wire them in so you’ve got utility on them.

Team aliases without Workspace

Well, there’s some features that are built in to improv that are not intuitive. It takes you a little while. Not only can you have a given email address forwarded to your Gmail inbox or to multiple Gmail inboxes. So when I set up a new startup idea, I tell all the people to stay on their own free Gmail account. And I just set up an alias for each one of their accounts that forwards to their specific Gmail inbox. It’s just stupid easy.

A founder is going to be pissed as all hell if they’ve got five contractors with five emails on their domain and they’re paying $12 to $36 a month for Google Workspace accounts and they realize they can get it for free.

Email → webhook

But you can also have an email alias that sends to a webhook. That means that if you have a team that needs to kick things over to legal, you can forward it to an inbox and that inbox will take that message and send it as a post to a webhook. So you can have an agent on the other end pick it up, tear it apart, look for issues, inject it into your ticket management system, kick it over to Slack if you want a team to look at it. It’s incredibly powerful to get email to webhook functionality.

Co-founder pitch

The less you have, the less you configure, the less you have to secure. So if you tell your co-founder why you’re using ImprovMX, it may not seem sexy. It won’t seem like you’re a tech startup. It is super lightweight, which means that you can do a lot without actually having to spend much. A paid account gets, I think, 30 domains for $8 a month. It’s the absolute best money I ever spent because now I can send and receive emails. I can scale up a team.

What not to pitch investors

You absolutely should not tell your investors anything about this part of your tech stack. If you’re telling them, their eyes are going to glaze over and they’re going to wonder why you’re not talking about sales. So talk about sales. Don’t talk about this part of your tech stack. There’s absolutely no scale or investment value. There’s no multiples on exit because you’re using it. This is a pure utility play at a founder level. This is for the founder who wants to use their money and their time to grow their business and not just pay Google money to support their email.

How we use it — Fractional.tools

Fractional.tools can have legal support. And every one of my team members sets that up to receive emails, all going back to their Gmail inbox.

See the stack map: Fractional.tools tech stack — domain email without Workspace tax on every side project domain.

At a glance

• What it is: Catch-all and alias routing into Gmail, SMTP outbound, webhook aliases—~$8/month for a portfolio of domains instead of Workspace per seat.
• Best for: Founders with multiple domains, contractors on free Gmail who still need @yourdomain, legal/support inboxes that should POST to a webhook, staging domains that need real send/receive.
• Not a fit: When you need the full Google Workspace suite, shared drives, and calendar under one vendor—or when “looks like a real tech startup” mailbox branding matters more than burn.
• Peer context: Postmark and Resend — product mail and deliverability; ImprovMX is founder/ops domain routing, not transactional send at scale.

When to reach for it

Sign up on ImprovMX. I think you can get one account for free. Set it up, wire it up so that your domain or whatever you’re playing with, even a secondary domain you might be using for staging, is set up to send emails. It’s astoundingly easy and once you do the DNS once, it will be super intuitive. And you can go grab all your other domains, drop them in, and upgrade for the $8 a month.

Watchouts

Some features built into Improv are not intuitive—it takes you a little while to find webhook routing and the full alias model. DNS is real work once per domain; after that, dropping in the rest of the portfolio is the payoff.

See it in the stack: Fractional.tools and the tech stack map.

Related playbook entries

• Fly.io — same hidden-gem pattern: not the feature you think you want, lightweight utility that founders walk past.
• Postmark — when product email needs deliverability, templates, and engagement webhooks—not domain alias routing.

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