Short answer: as at September 2026, cheap business email hosting in the UK starts at about £1 a month on an introductory offer and settles between roughly £2.50 and £5.90 per mailbox or per user once you are paying the real price. A genuine bargain differs from a false economy in three ways: whether you are billed per person or per business, what the price does at renewal, and how much storage each mailbox gets. UKBox Starter Email is £4.99 a month ex VAT for ten mailboxes — for the whole business, not per head — and the price is held for three years. Here is the honest comparison, including where the cheaper options beat us.
Every figure below comes from the provider's own published UK pricing and excludes VAT. Pricing pages change often, so we have dated ours rather than leaving you to guess how old they are.
| Provider and plan | Headline price | Price after the offer | Storage | Billed per |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IONOS Email (checked 4 Sep 2026) | £1/mo for 12 months | £2.50/mo | 2 GB per mailbox, 5 accounts | plan (5 accounts) |
| IONOS Hosted Exchange (4 Sep 2026) | £1/mo for 3 months | £6.00/mo | 50 GB per mailbox | mailbox |
| Exchange Online Plan 1 (4 Sep 2026) | £3.10/user/mo, paid yearly | no intro period | 50 GB plus 50 GB archive | user |
| 123 Reg Email Pro Light (31 Aug 2026) | promotional first term | £3.99/mailbox/mo | 10 GB per mailbox | mailbox |
| Microsoft 365 Business Basic (4 Sep 2026) | £5.40/user/mo, paid yearly | no intro period | 100 GB plus 50 GB archive | user |
| Google Workspace Business Starter (2 Sep 2026) | £5.90/user/mo, annual plan | no intro period | 30 GB across Gmail, Drive and Photos | user |
| UKBox Starter Email | £4.99/mo for 10 mailboxes | held for 3 years | 10 GB per mailbox, 100 GB pooled | business |
The first row deserves a moment, because the cheapest headline price in the British market is not ours. IONOS sells email at £1 a month for the first year and £2.50 after that, with five accounts and a free domain included, on its UK email hosting page. If two gigabytes per mailbox is enough for you, that is real value and we will not pretend otherwise.
Per-user pricing looks harmless at five pounds, but it is a multiplier. Ten mailboxes on Microsoft 365 Business Basic is £54 a month; on Google Workspace Business Starter it is £59. And most small firms do not have ten people — they have four people and six addresses, because info@, accounts@, sales@, bookings@ and careers@ all need to exist. Under per-user pricing you are charged for a mailbox nobody sits at. That single difference is why our £4.99 plan is not a loss-leader: it charges for the business rather than the headcount.
Introductory pricing is the oldest trick in UK hosting: entirely legal, entirely disclosed and entirely easy to miss. A £1 offer that becomes £2.50 has risen by 150%. IONOS Hosted Exchange at £1 for three months becomes £6 a month four months after you sign up. Do one piece of arithmetic before you buy — multiply the renewal price by 36 and compare that figure across your shortlist. Our three-year cost calculator does it for you. We hold new customers' prices for three years in writing and never change existing customers' prices, which is the only reason we are willing to invite that comparison.
Storage is where the cheapest plans stop being cheap. Two gigabytes sounds fine until somebody emails a set of photographs or a year of PDF invoices lands in the sent folder. The IONOS entry plan gives five people ten gigabytes between them for £2.50 a month. Our Starter plan gives ten people ten gigabytes each, pooled into a hundred, for £4.99. Per mailbox the two land at almost exactly the same price — around 50p — but the storage is five times deeper, and we sell extra capacity at £2 a month per 10 GB block rather than making you jump a tier.
We would rather say this here than have you switch and regret it. IONOS bundles a free domain and 24/7 support on every plan; our support is not 24/7 and we include a domain only on the Done-For-You tier. Microsoft's Exchange Online Plan 1 gives 50 GB plus a 50 GB archive for £3.10 a user, and Business Basic now carries 100 GB — more per person than we offer, with archiving and legal hold we do not sell at all. Google Workspace adds Docs, Sheets, Drive and Meet.
So the rule is simple. If your team lives in Word, Excel, Teams or SharePoint, buy Microsoft 365 and stop reading comparison articles. If it lives in Docs and shared drives, buy Google Workspace. We do not offer mailing lists or email archiving and will not claim we do. What we sell is business email at your own domain, priced per business, on UK servers.
Cheap is fine. Fragile is not, and the difference is invisible on the pricing page. Check that SPF, DKIM and DMARC are configured as standard rather than left as a support ticket for you to raise, because that decides whether your quotes land in the inbox or the junk folder. Ask how often backups run, how long they are kept and whether one deleted message can be restored. Ask where the servers physically are. Ask whether migration is included or billed as a project.
For the record, ours: SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up by default; daily backups kept for a rolling five days and copied off site to a second UK data centre; single mailbox or single message restores on request; hardware in our own UK data centres; free migration with no message loss, out of hours if that keeps disruption off your working day. The detail sits on our email deliverability page. Two honest limits belong here too: our 99.9% uptime figure is a target rather than an SLA backed by service credits, and while our team works most days from around 5am to midnight with typical replies inside ten minutes between 8am and 5pm, we do not run a guaranteed 24/7 desk.
The clearest way to see what cheap really means is to price the same requirement — ten mailboxes for a small British firm — across the market. Ex VAT, as at September 2026:
| Option | How it is priced | Cost per year |
|---|---|---|
| Exchange Online Plan 1 | 10 × £3.10 per user, paid yearly | £372.00 |
| 123 Reg Email Pro Light | 10 × £3.99 per mailbox at renewal | £478.80 |
| Microsoft 365 Business Basic | 10 × £5.40 per user, paid yearly | £648.00 |
| Google Workspace Business Starter | 10 × £5.90 per user, annual plan | £708.00 |
| UKBox Starter Email | flat £4.99 for the business, annual billing | £49.90 |
That gap is not a discount or a trial. It is what happens when a mailbox is treated as a mailbox rather than a software licence. The trade is equally plain: Microsoft and Google are selling you an office suite as well, and we are not.
On headline price, IONOS at £1 a month for the first year and £2.50 afterwards was the lowest we found when we checked on 4 September 2026, with five accounts of 2 GB each. Cheapest per usable mailbox is a flat-rate plan: our ten mailboxes at £4.99 work out at about 50p each with 10 GB apiece.
It can be, if the unglamorous parts are in place. Authentication set up by default, daily off-site backups with a real restore process, servers you can locate, and a human who answers. A low price is not the risk; an unanswered question about backups is.
Yes. Your address belongs to your domain, not your provider, so moving host does not change it. Every message and folder copies across by IMAP synchronisation, and we run that migration for you free of charge, out of hours if it suits you better.
No, and anyone claiming otherwise at these prices is selling you a Microsoft licence with a margin on top. If you need the Office applications, Teams or SharePoint, buy Microsoft 365 — we say the same thing in our guide to a flat-rate Microsoft 365 alternative.
Ten gigabytes a mailbox covers most people comfortably for years unless you exchange large attachments daily. Our plans add a shared pool on top of the per-mailbox allowance, so one heavy user does not lock everyone else out, and extra capacity is £2 a month per 10 GB block if you need it.
Count your real mailboxes, including the ones that are addresses rather than people, and price them against what you pay now. If the sum favours your current provider, stay put. If it does not, our plans start at £4.99 a month ex VAT with no setup fee, no contract, a three-year price hold in writing and free migration. See UKBox email hosting, or call 0330 088 2279 and ask the awkward questions first.
— The UKBox team
