The short answer: a professional email address is a mailbox on a domain you own — you@yourbusiness.co.uk rather than a free Gmail or Outlook address. In the UK as at September 2026 it costs from £8.95 a year for the domain, plus roughly £2.50 to £5.40 a month for the mailbox, depending on whether your provider charges per person or per business. Setting one up takes an afternoon: register a domain, choose somewhere for the mailboxes to live, create the addresses, and publish a few DNS records so the rest of the internet trusts your mail.
There is no certification and no register. The only thing that separates a professional address from a personal one is who controls the bit after the @. If it is a domain your business owns, the address is yours: you decide who gets one, what they are called, and where they go when someone leaves. If it is gmail.com or outlook.com, you are a guest on someone else's domain.
That distinction matters more than the tone of the address. hello@ is no more professional than sarah@. What customers, banks, suppliers and procurement portals actually read is the domain — and increasingly, so do the mail servers deciding whether to put your message in an inbox or a spam folder.
A .co.uk or .uk domain is £8.95 a year with us and a .com is £12.95, both excluding VAT. You can register one purely for email and never build a website on it. Some providers bundle a domain free for the first year — IONOS does on its email plans — which is a real saving worth taking if you are choosing between two otherwise equal options. Check the renewal price, not the first-year price.
Here the market splits into two models, and the split matters far more than any individual price. Most providers charge per person, per month: every new starter adds to the bill. A few, us included, charge a flat price for the business and let you create mailboxes up to a limit.
These are the entry business-email options, list prices excluding VAT, read from each provider's own pages on 16 September 2026.
| Option | How it is priced | Storage | One person | Ten people |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| UKBox Starter Email | Flat, per business | 10 GB per mailbox, 100 GB pooled | £4.99/mo | £4.99/mo |
| IONOS Email | Bundle of 5 accounts | 2 GB per account | £1/mo for 12 months, then £2.50/mo | Extra-mailbox price not published |
| Exchange Online Plan 1 | Per user | 50 GB plus 50 GB archive | £3.10/mo | £31/mo |
| Microsoft 365 Business Basic | Per user | 100 GB plus 50 GB archive | £5.40/mo | £54/mo |
Two honest notes on that table. The figures come straight from each provider's own pages — IONOS email hosting, Exchange Online plans and Microsoft 365 business plans — and Microsoft's per-user rates are its yearly-commitment price. We cannot give you a Google Workspace figure, because Google's UK pricing page renders its prices in a way we could not read on 16 September and we will not quote a number we have not re-checked. Google does publish the storage: 30 GB per user on Business Starter.
Run the arithmetic for the team you expect to have in two years, not the one you have today. At one person, per-user pricing is usually cheaper — Exchange Online Plan 1 at £3.10 undercuts our £4.99, and IONOS undercuts everyone at £2.50 after its intro year. At two people Exchange Plan 1 costs £6.20 and flat pricing has already won. At ten, the same Microsoft plan is £31 a month and ours has not moved.
IONOS is the genuine exception and we will not pretend otherwise: five accounts for £2.50 a month beats our flat £4.99 for any team up to five. The trade is storage — 2 GB per account against our 10 GB — and the fact that IONOS does not publish a price for mailboxes beyond the five included, so nobody can show you a fair ten-person figure for it. If you are three people who will still be three people in 2029, take the cheaper option. Our three-year cost calculator will work it through with your own numbers.
Shorter is better, and match your trading name if you can. For a UK business .co.uk is the safe default; .com travels further internationally. Register it in the company's name, not an employee's or an agency's — that single detail causes more grief than anything else in this article.
Email hosting and web hosting are separate products that happen to be sold together. If you have no website, buy email-only hosting and skip the server you would never upload to. If you do want a site, check whether mailboxes are included: our own web hosting starts at £4.79 a month excluding VAT and includes ten of them.
Pick one pattern and apply it to everyone — firstname@ for small teams, firstname.lastname@ once you have two Sarahs. Add role addresses such as info@, accounts@ and support@ as aliases pointing at real people rather than as separate mailboxes, so the address survives the person leaving. Aliases and forwarders are unlimited on our plans, so this costs nothing.
These three DNS records tell receiving servers that mail claiming to come from your domain really does. They are no longer optional: Google's own email sender guidelines require every sender to set up SPF or DKIM, and senders of more than 5,000 messages a day to a Gmail address to have SPF, DKIM and DMARC all in place, with a spam rate kept below 0.30%. Any decent host will configure them for you — ours are set by default, and we explain the mechanics on our deliverability page.
Nothing, while you are testing whether a business idea works. That is the honest answer, and if you are three weeks into something that may not exist by Christmas, a free mailbox is a reasonable decision.
What it costs later is control. A Gmail address belongs to the person who opened it, so when they leave, the enquiries, the supplier logins and the password resets leave too. You cannot create accounts@ on a domain you do not own. And you cannot authenticate mail for a domain you do not control, which means the trust signals above are simply unavailable to you. None of this is fatal at the start; all of it is expensive to unpick at forty customers.
If you need Word, Excel, Teams or SharePoint, buy Microsoft 365 — we do not sell them and our email will not replace them. If you are five people or fewer and price is the only criterion, IONOS is cheaper than us and will stay cheaper. If you are one person who wants a very large mailbox, Exchange Online Plan 1 gives you 50 GB for £3.10 where we give 10 GB for £4.99.
We also do not offer mailing-list software or email archiving. If either is a requirement, we are the wrong choice and it is better you know now than after a migration.
| Starter Email £4.99/mo +VAT | Secure Email £8.99/mo +VAT | Done-For-You £14.99/mo +VAT |
|---|---|---|
| 10 mailboxes, 10 GB each, 100 GB pooled | 20 mailboxes, 20 GB each, 400 GB pooled | Unlimited mailboxes, 500 GB pooled, domain included |
| All plans: no setup fee, no contract, price held for three years in writing, free zero-loss migration, unlimited aliases and forwarders, catch-all, auto-responders, calendars and contacts via CalDAV and CardDAV, daily off-site backups kept five days, UK data centres in London, Coventry and Maidenhead. Pay annually and two months are free. | ||
Two caveats we keep in print: our 99.9% uptime figure is a target rather than a credit-backed SLA, and our support is not a guaranteed 24/7 service — typical replies run about ten minutes between 8am and 5pm, with staff around from roughly 5am to midnight, 365 days a year.
No. You need a domain, which you can register and point at mailboxes without ever building a site. Email-only hosting exists precisely for this.
One mailbox per person, plus role aliases such as info@ and accounts@ that forward to real people. Ten mailboxes covers most businesses under about eight staff with room for the roles.
Yes, as long as you own the domain. The address stays the same; only the server behind it changes. Our migration copies every message, folder and calendar across and we verify the counts before switching over.
No. For a UK business, .co.uk signals that you are local and is what most customers expect. A .com is worth having as well if you trade internationally or want to protect the name.
With us, nothing for three years — that is written into our terms rather than offered as a promotion. Elsewhere, read the renewal rate before the headline rate: an introductory £1 a month is an ordinary way to sell a plan that bills at two and a half times that afterwards.
If you want professional email on your own domain without a per-person bill, our email hosting plans start at £4.99 a month excluding VAT for ten mailboxes, and the migration from whatever you are on now is free. Call 0330 088 2279 if you would rather talk it through first.
— The UKBox team
