One setup fee, one small yearly fee, unlimited staff -- we tested whether Tifamail's flat-price, letterhead-on-everything approach actually works for Kenyan SMEs.
Most Kenyan businesses pay for email one person at a time. Hire a new accountant and the bill goes up; open a second branch and it goes up again. Tifamail takes the opposite approach: one setup fee and one small yearly fee for the whole company, with unlimited staff and addresses, branded templates applied to every message, and an AI assistant that writes emails and builds invoices, quotations and proposals on your letterhead.
It was built in Nairobi for Kenyan businesses — shilling pricing, M-Pesa payments, SMS sign-in codes for Kenyan numbers — and is open to businesses anywhere, who pay in US dollars by card. This review covers what you get, what it costs, how it compares and where its limits are.
Branded business email on your own domain with an AI email writer and document studio -- one payment covers the whole company.
| Feature | What you get |
|---|---|
| Setup (one-time) | KES 3,200 (USD 25 outside Kenya), includes the first full year |
| Annual maintenance | KES 1,200 per year (USD 10) from year two, for the whole company |
| Users and addresses | Unlimited |
| Storage | 10 GB shared across the company; extra 10 GB blocks at KES 1,200 |
| AI credit | KES 500 free on signup, then prepaid top-ups via M-Pesa or card |
| Brand designs | 65 packages (50 classic, 15 premium) — email template, A4 letterhead and invoice |
| Payments | M-Pesa, Visa, Mastercard |
| Security | AES-256-GCM encryption at rest, two-step sign-in, daily encrypted backups |
| Developers | REST API with admin-issued keys |
The headline feature is the pricing model. Global suites charge per user per month, so a 20-person company on Google Workspace Business Starter pays for 20 seats every month, forever. On Tifamail the same company pays KES 3,200 once and then KES 1,200 a year — whether it has 3 staff or 300. Admins can add as many people and addresses (sales@, accounts@, info@) as they like, and everyone draws from the same shared storage and AI credit.
The trade-off is that storage is pooled rather than per mailbox: the company gets 10 GB in total, not 10 GB each. For a typical SME that sends quotations, invoices and correspondence rather than gigabytes of video, that is plenty for a long time, and extra space is sold in 10 GB blocks at KES 1,200 when it is needed. See our full pricing breakdown for worked examples.
Tifamail's second promise is consistent branding. During setup an admin uploads the company logo — the system crops and trims it, detects white logos so they sit on dark headers cleanly, and even reads the text inside the logo so the company name is not printed twice. You then pick one of 65 brand packages across styles such as Band, Stripe, Sidebar, Two-tone, Minimal, Geometric, Gradient, Editorial and Executive, plus 15 premium designs.
Each package is a set: an email template, an A4 letterhead and a matching invoice, all using your logo, colours and fonts. Once chosen, it applies to every message anyone on the team sends. The receptionist's reply and the CEO's proposal look like they came from the same company — because they did. Even the web app itself adopts your brand colour as its accent, adjusted for readable contrast. You can browse the library on the Tifamail designs page.
This is where Tifamail separates itself from ordinary mail hosting. Inside the composer you describe an email in a sentence — "follow up on the unpaid invoice, friendly tone" — and the AI drafts it in your tone, inside your letterhead, ready to edit and send.
The document studio goes further. Type something like "Quotation for 40 office chairs at KES 12,500, delivery in Nairobi, valid 30 days" and it produces a finished quotation on your A4 letterhead with correct totals and VAT. Invoices, proposals, contracts, letters, offer letters, minutes and reports all work the same way. You refine by chatting ("add a 5% discount and our M-Pesa paybill"), every change is saved as a version you can restore, and the result downloads as a PDF or goes straight to the client as an attachment.
Billing is pay-as-you-go from a prepaid company AI wallet, and the important detail is that a quick pre-check estimates the cost before any job runs and only proceeds if there is enough credit. Admins can also set monthly AI limits per staff member, so nobody can burn through the wallet. Our guide to AI invoices and quotations on your letterhead walks through it.
Good-looking email is useless in a spam folder, so Tifamail generates SPF, DKIM and DMARC records for your domain and runs a guided check that confirms each one. Sending from your domain is only switched on once those records verify, which prevents the classic mistake of launching with half-configured DNS. Every sent message then shows its status — delivered, bounced or rejected — so nothing disappears silently.
Switching is designed around not losing mail. Tifamail imports existing mailboxes from Gmail, Outlook, Zoho, cPanel and Yahoo before you move your domain, resuming where it left off and skipping duplicates. After the switch it keeps checking the old mailboxes for seven days to catch anything delivered while DNS was propagating. Day to day, the web app feels familiar: threaded conversations, folded quoted history, address autocomplete that learns from your mail, fast typo-tolerant search, and it installs on a phone or desktop like an app.
Meetings are built in too: send a branded invitation with Attend, Maybe and Decline buttons plus a calendar file, and responses land on a live dashboard — guests do not need an account.
Tifamail is the strongest fit for Kenyan SMEs, schools, SACCOs, NGOs, consultancies, clinics and growing teams that want every staff member on a professional address without a per-user bill, and that send a lot of quotations, invoices and letters. It is also a natural fit for businesses whose brand matters in every interaction — law firms, agencies, real estate companies, hospitality businesses. Businesses that need a full productivity suite should compare it against the suites in our Tifamail vs Google Workspace vs Microsoft 365 vs Zoho comparison.
KES 3,200 one-time setup, which includes the first full year and KES 500 of AI credit, then KES 1,200 per year from year two. The price covers the whole company, not each user. Extra storage is KES 1,200 per 10 GB.
No. One setup fee and one yearly fee cover unlimited people and addresses. Everyone shares the storage and AI credit, and admins can cap AI use per person.
Yes. Tifamail imports inbox, sent items and archives from Gmail, Outlook, Zoho, cPanel, Yahoo and other IMAP providers before you switch your domain, and keeps checking the old mailbox for seven days after the switch.
Yes. Kenyan businesses pay in shillings by M-Pesa or card. Businesses outside Kenya see prices in US dollars and pay by card.
Yes. The web app is responsive and can be installed on Android, iPhone or desktop like a native app, straight from the browser.
Tifamail gets the fundamentals right — authenticated delivery, encrypted storage, safe migration — and then adds two things Kenyan businesses genuinely need: a price that does not grow with headcount and AI that produces finished, branded documents rather than plain text. At KES 3,200 to start and KES 1,200 a year after, it is one of the cheapest ways to put an entire team on professional email in Kenya. Ranking Kenya rates it 4.7/5. You can start a Tifamail workspace here.
