Infraforge is the private email infrastructure product in the Salesforge family. It sells dedicated IPs, automated DNS and pre-warmed domains for teams that have outgrown shared sending pools. It is a genuinely good product. The reasons people go looking for an alternative are rarely about whether it works.
They are about three things: the annual commitment, the price per mailbox once you scale past a few dozen, and the fact that infrastructure is sold as its own subscription separate from the outreach tool, the mailbox provider, the warmup tool and the lead database. Buy the full stack and you are managing five products and five invoices.
This is a comparison of the five alternatives worth looking at, and what each one is actually for.
Why teams look for an Infraforge alternative
- Annual billing. Infrastructure priced on a yearly commitment is a problem if your sending volume is seasonal, if you run client campaigns that start and stop, or if you simply do not know yet how many mailboxes you need.
- Stacked subscriptions. Private infrastructure is one product. Google and Microsoft mailboxes are another. Warmup is another. Lead data is another. The sequencer is another. Each renews separately.
- Cost per mailbox at scale. Infrastructure economics should improve as you add mailboxes, because the marginal cost of another mailbox on an IP you already own is close to zero. Not every provider passes that on.
- Agency workspace management. Running twenty client accounts means twenty sets of domains and DNS. If that is not first-class in the product, it becomes a spreadsheet.
None of that means Infraforge is the wrong choice. It means the right choice depends on how you buy, not just what you send.
1. Mailboundry (inside Outboundry), best for monthly billing and a single stack
Mailboundry is our own sending infrastructure, and it exists precisely because of the stacking problem above. Every mailbox gets a dedicated IP. SPF, DKIM and DMARC are generated and published automatically when a domain is added, and can be updated in bulk across hundreds of domains at once. You can buy domains inside the app at cost up to $14 per TLD instead of registering them elsewhere and pointing DNS by hand.
The part that matters for this comparison is the commercial model. Mailboundry bills monthly, quarterly or annually across five volume tiers, you pick, and you can move down as easily as up. And it sits inside the same Outboundry subscription as cold email, LinkedIn outreach, 500M+ lead data, unlimited warmup and the unified inbox. One invoice, one login, one place where a bounce in a campaign traces back to the domain and IP that sent it.
Best for: teams and agencies that want private infrastructure without an annual lock-in, and who would rather run one platform than five.
Watch out for: if you only want infrastructure and already love your sequencer, you are paying for capability you will not use.
2. Infraforge, the incumbent, if you can live with the terms
Worth keeping on the list honestly. Infraforge does what it says: private infrastructure, dedicated IPs, automated DNS, domain masking, pre-warmed mailboxes, and a whitelabel programme for resellers. The documentation is good and the deliverability engineering is real.
Best for: teams already inside the Salesforge ecosystem who are also using the sequencer and the mailbox product, where the cross-product integration is worth the multiple subscriptions.
Watch out for: billing terms and total stack cost. Price the whole stack you actually need, not the infrastructure line alone.
3. Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 mailboxes, when trust matters more than volume
Private SMTP is not always the answer. If you are sending lower volume to enterprise recipients, real Google or Microsoft mailboxes carry sender trust that no private stack can manufacture, and they handle threading and replies the way recipients expect.
The catch has always been price. Buying seats direct from Google runs several times what a reseller charges, and provisioning fifty of them by hand is a day of work. Outboundry sells Google and Microsoft mailboxes at $4 per mailbox per month with DNS handled automatically, which is the same model Primeforge sells, at a lower price and without a separate subscription.
Best for: lower-volume, higher-value outbound where inbox trust beats cost per send.
Watch out for: per-seat pricing means the maths stops working somewhere between 50 and 100 mailboxes. Past that, private infrastructure wins on cost.
4. Self-hosted (Mailcow, Postal, iRedMail), cheapest, and the most expensive
You can run your own mail server on a VPS for the price of the VPS. Teams with a systems engineer on staff genuinely do this and it works.
What you are actually taking on is IP reputation management, blacklist monitoring and delisting, PTR and rDNS setup with your host, TLS certificate renewal, and being the person who gets paged when DNS breaks at midnight before a Monday send. The software is free. The operational load is not.
Best for: technical teams with a genuine reason to control the stack end to end.
Watch out for: the first blacklisting. That is when most teams work out what managed infrastructure was actually buying them.
5. Transactional ESPs (Amazon SES, SendGrid, Postmark), usually the wrong tool
They come up constantly in this search because they are cheap per email. They are built for transactional mail, receipts, password resets, notifications, where recipients asked for the message. Their acceptable use policies generally treat cold outreach as a violation, and enforcement is account suspension, not a warning.
Best for: product and transactional email, which is what they are excellent at.
Watch out for: using them for cold outreach at all. The cost saving is not worth losing the account and the domains attached to it.
How to actually compare them
| Question | Why it decides the choice |
|---|---|
| Monthly or annual? | If your volume moves, an annual commitment prices your worst month as your baseline. |
| Dedicated IP per mailbox, or per pool? | Per-pool means one bad campaign on the pool affects the rest. Per mailbox isolates the damage. |
| Is DNS automated across domains? | At 40+ domains, manual SPF and DKIM edits are the single biggest source of silent deliverability failures. |
| Where do domains come from? | Buying inside the platform removes a registrar, a DNS host and a hand-off from the process. |
| What does the whole stack cost? | Infrastructure, mailboxes, warmup, data and sequencer. Compare the total, not the cheapest line. |
| Can you run separate client workspaces? | For agencies, this is the difference between a product and a spreadsheet. |
The honest summary: if you are committed to the Salesforge stack and the annual terms suit you, Infraforge is a sound product. If the annual commitment, the per-mailbox economics at scale, or running five separate subscriptions is what sent you looking, that is exactly the gap Mailboundry was built for.
Next, read our breakdown of when a dedicated IP is worth paying for, or compare the full Outboundry and Salesforge stacks side by side.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best Infraforge alternative?
It depends on what you are replacing. If you want the same private-infrastructure model but with monthly billing and outreach bundled in, Mailboundry inside Outboundry is the closest match. If you specifically need Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 mailboxes rather than a private SMTP stack, look at a mailbox provider instead.
Is private email infrastructure better than Google Workspace for cold email?
Neither is universally better. Private infrastructure gives you dedicated IPs, unlimited mailboxes per domain and far lower cost per mailbox at volume. Google and Microsoft mailboxes carry more inherent sender trust and handle replies more naturally. Most teams sending seriously at scale run both and split campaigns between them.
Do I need a dedicated IP for cold email?
If you send more than a few thousand emails a month, yes. On a shared IP your inbox placement is affected by every other sender on that IP, including ones you will never see. A dedicated IP means your reputation is entirely a product of your own sending behaviour.
Can I switch infrastructure providers without burning my domains?
Yes, but do it gradually. Point the new mailboxes at fresh domains, warm them for two to three weeks, then taper volume off the old provider rather than cutting over in one day. A sudden change of sending IP on an established domain is itself a deliverability signal.
How much should cold email infrastructure cost per mailbox?
Private SMTP infrastructure should land well under a dollar per mailbox per month at volume, because you are really paying for IPs and domains, not seats. Google or Microsoft mailboxes are priced per seat, so expect a few dollars each. Anything charging seat pricing for private infrastructure is marking up heavily.