If you run a UK business and just need professional email on your own domain, the market is more confusing than it should be. Some providers charge per mailbox, some per user, some bundle it with web hosting, and the headline price is rarely the price you pay in year two. This is an honest look at where UKBox fits — including where it does not win.
Full disclosure before anything else: UKBox Ltd was incorporated in 2023, which makes us a younger company than most of the names below. We think our pricing and our UK infrastructure make us the best-value option for a lot of businesses, but we will tell you plainly where a bigger platform suits you better.
Almost every other provider charges per mailbox or per user, so your email bill grows every time you hire someone. UKBox is priced per business. Our Starter plan is £4.99 a month +VAT and covers ten mailboxes; taking on an eleventh member of staff does not change the bill until you outgrow the mailbox count.
Storage works differently too. Each mailbox has its own allowance, and every mailbox on the account also draws on a shared account total — so a busy mailbox is not cut off the moment it passes its own allowance, it draws on the pool. You can set fixed per-mailbox quotas in cPanel if you would rather divide it strictly, and you can add storage in 10 GB blocks at £2 +VAT a month, up to 20 blocks. Current allowances for each plan are listed on our email hosting page.
Entry business-email plans, list prices ex VAT. Microsoft and Google figures are their UK list prices on annual billing; 123 Reg figures are the renewal rate rather than the introductory offer, because the renewal rate is what you actually live with.
| Provider | How it is priced | Cost for ten people |
|---|---|---|
| UKBox — Starter Email | Flat, per business | £4.99/mo |
| 123 Reg — Pro Light | Per mailbox (£3.99 at renewal) | £39.90/mo |
| Microsoft 365 — Business Basic | Per user (£5.40) | £54.00/mo |
| Google Workspace — Business Starter | Per user (£5.90) | £59.00/mo |
123 Reg prices checked on their own pages 31 August 2026; Microsoft UK prices checked 31 August 2026; Google Workspace UK list checked 13 August 2026. Always confirm on each provider's own site before deciding — intro offers and renewal rates change.
The gap is not a trick of tiering. It is simply what happens when one provider charges per person and another charges per business. It is also worth knowing that aliases and forwarders are unlimited on our plans, so info@, sales@ and accounts@ can all land in one mailbox at no extra cost. You pay for people who need a login, not for every address on your website.
Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are not really email hosts — they are productivity suites. If you need Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive, the Office desktop apps, or the full Google ecosystem, buy them; nothing at £4.99 a month replaces those. They are also more generous on storage per person: Microsoft moved its Business mailboxes to 100 GB per user during 2026, and Google Business Starter gives 30 GB per user. Per head, they give you more room than we do, and no amount of framing changes that. What you are paying for is a per-person licence covering a lot of software you may not use.
123 Reg has been going since 2000 and has been part of GoDaddy since 2017. They are not going anywhere, they publish their renewal prices honestly, and if you prepay their cheapest hosting for three years they cost less than we do over that period. Their mailboxes come with generous per-mailbox storage. The catch is the pricing model and the renewal cliff: their cheapest hosting plan runs at £1.99 a month on the introductory term and £6.99 after it.
UKBox wins when you want proper UK-hosted IMAP email — Outlook, Apple Mail, iPhone and Android — with SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured as standard, shared calendars and contacts over CalDAV and CardDAV, free zero-loss migration, and a price held in writing for three years, without paying per head. For a team of ten to thirty that already has the Office licences it needs and just wants reliable email, it is hard to beat on cost.
Whoever you choose, ask the same six questions. Is my price held, or does it jump at renewal? Is storage counted per mailbox or shared, and what happens when someone fills theirs? How are SPF, DKIM and DMARC handled? How long are backups kept, and can a single deleted mailbox be restored? Is migration included, and who does the work? Can I leave cleanly, with standard IMAP and my own domain?
For the record, our answers: the price is held for three years in writing; storage is a per-mailbox allowance drawing on a shared account pool, with top-up blocks at £2 +VAT per 10 GB; all three authentication records are configured by default; backups run daily and are copied off site to a second UK data centre, and a single mailbox or message can be restored on request; migration is free and we do it for you; and there is no contract, so you can cancel any time and your domain stays yours.
Our 99.9% uptime figure is a target and a track record, not a credit-backed SLA. If you need contractual service credits, ask us and we will discuss it rather than pretend the standard plan includes them. Support replies in about ten minutes between 8am and 5pm and staff are generally around from early morning to late evening, but that is not a guaranteed 24/7 desk. And we are a 2023 company: what sits on the other side of that is our own space in UK data centres in London, Coventry and Maidenhead rather than resold cloud, accounts filed at Companies House and prepared by chartered accountants, and around 5,000 websites hosted.
Both, in effect. Each mailbox has its own allowance, and all the mailboxes on an account also draw on a shared account total, so a busy mailbox can exceed its allowance rather than being locked out. You can set fixed per-mailbox quotas in cPanel, and add 10 GB blocks at £2 +VAT a month up to 20 blocks. Current allowances are shown against each plan on the email hosting page.
We own our servers outright in UK data centres, so the hardware is already paid for, and we price per business rather than per head. We would rather win your business than charge you per gigabyte.
Only for email, calendars and contacts. If you need Teams, SharePoint and the Office desktop apps, Microsoft 365 is the right choice and we will tell you so. You can also keep an Office apps licence and move only your mailboxes to us.
Nothing. The price is held for three years in writing, and existing customers' prices do not change when we launch new plans. Annual billing costs ten months for twelve.
Multiply your headcount by whatever your current provider charges per person, then compare it with a flat £4.99, £8.99, £19.99 or £34.99. The full range of email plans is here, the three-year cost calculator does the arithmetic for your exact team size, and if you want the awkward questions first, the twelve questions to ask any UK email provider covers the ones we find uncomfortable too.
Competitor figures above come from the providers' own published pages: 123 Reg email hosting and Microsoft 365 Business Basic UK pricing.
— The UKBox team
