Buying guide
How to compare email hosting providers in East Africa
· 7 min read · Egreed Tech, Kigali
Feature lists all look the same. These are the questions that change the answer once you are six months in.
Can you actually pay them?
Dollar pricing plus an international card requirement disqualifies plenty of otherwise good providers for a Rwandan company. Ask for pricing in RWF, invoices your accountant can file, and a payment method you already use.
When you have a problem, who answers and when?
Support in a distant time zone means a full day lost per exchange. Ask which hours are covered, in which languages, and whether a real person will look at your DNS with you.
What tooling do you get for deliverability?
A provider that hands you records and wishes you luck is leaving you the hardest part. Look for live DNS validation and per-message delivery status so a bounce tells you the reason.
How hard is it to leave?
Ask before you sign: can you export all mail and files, does the account become read-only or vanish when billing stops, and do you keep control of your domain? A provider confident in its product answers this comfortably.
Is storage part of the deal?
Email and files are the same workflow — attachments become documents. A platform with mail, drive and archival storage in one place removes an entire integration you would otherwise maintain.
Put this into practice
Company mailboxes on your own domain, encrypted storage, priced in Rwandan francs.