Short answer: if your team mainly needs email at your own domain, Google Workspace's per-user pricing is the expensive part. Business Starter is £5.90 per user per month ex VAT on the annual plan (£7.00 on the flexible plan) as at September 2026, so ten people is £708 a year. UKBox Starter Email is £4.99 a month ex VAT for the whole business — ten mailboxes, not ten licences — which is £49.90 a year on annual billing. But Workspace is not just email. If your team lives in Docs, Sheets, Drive and Meet, stay where you are. Here is the honest version.
Prices below are per user, per month, excluding VAT, from Google's published UK pricing. The annual plan is cheaper per user but commits you for twelve months; the flexible plan is monthly with no commitment and costs roughly a fifth more.
| Google Workspace plan | Annual plan | Flexible plan | Storage per user |
|---|---|---|---|
| Business Starter | £5.90 | £7.00 | 30 GB (Gmail, Drive and Photos combined) |
| Business Standard | £11.80 | £14.00 | 2 TB |
| Business Plus | £18.40 | £22.00 | 5 TB |
Two details catch people out. First, on the annual plan you can add licences whenever you like but can only reduce them at renewal — until then you pay for every licence you bought, including for staff who have left, and cancelling early means paying out the commitment. Google sets this out in its own comparison of the two plans. Second, Workspace prices rose by roughly 17–22% in January 2025 when Gemini was folded into the business plans. Under per-user pricing, every new hire adds to the bill and every rise is multiplied by your headcount.
We would rather tell you this up front than have you switch and regret it. Workspace gives you Docs, Sheets and Slides with real-time collaboration nobody has really matched, Drive with 2 TB per user on Business Standard, Meet, Chat, shared drives, Groups for mailing lists, retention and eDiscovery through Vault on the higher plans, Gemini built into Gmail, 24/7 support on paid plans, and a published service-level agreement backed by service credits.
We offer none of that. UKBox sells business email hosting, not an office suite. If your company runs on Docs and shared drives, needs archiving or legal hold for compliance, or uses Groups as mailing lists, then Google Workspace is the right product and you should buy it. We do not offer mailing lists or archiving, and we will not pretend otherwise.
Per-user pricing assumes every mailbox belongs to a person who uses the whole platform. In a lot of small British businesses that is simply not the case. A five-person building firm has five people who check mail on their phones, plus info@, accounts@ and quotes@. Nobody there has opened a spreadsheet in Drive this year.
That is the gap. You are buying a collaboration platform because you needed email at your own domain, and you are charged for it once per head, every month, for as long as you trade.
Annual billing, ex VAT, Google on Business Starter, UKBox on the plan that fits the mailbox count (our annual billing is ten months for twelve).
| Mailboxes | Google Business Starter | UKBox email hosting | Difference over three years |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | £354 a year | Starter — £49.90 a year | £912 |
| 10 | £708 a year | Starter — £49.90 a year | £1,974 |
| 20 | £1,416 a year | Secure — £89.90 a year | £3,978 |
| 50 | £3,540 a year | Email Pro — £199.90 a year | £10,020 |
Those three-year figures assume Google's price stays exactly where it is, which recent history suggests is optimistic. Ours is held for three years in writing, with no setup fee and no contract. You can run your own numbers in our three-year cost calculator.
Here is the comparison that most "alternative" articles skip. Google Business Starter gives 30 GB per user, so ten users share a 300 GB pool — more raw space than our Starter plan's 100 GB. That 30 GB has to cover Gmail, Drive and Google Photos together, whereas our pool is email only, and most small firms use a fraction of it for mail. But if you are storing files as well, Google's number is the bigger one, and on Business Standard its 2 TB per user is not something anyone at our price point matches.
If you need more from us, extra space is £2 a month per 10 GB block, or Secure Email at £8.99 gives 20 GB per mailbox pooled to 400 GB. Storage is a per-mailbox allowance plus a shared account pool, so a busy mailbox is not locked out the moment it passes its own allowance.
Flat pricing per business, ex VAT: Starter £4.99 (10 mailboxes, 10 GB each, 100 GB pooled), Secure £8.99 (20 mailboxes, 20 GB each, 400 GB pooled), Done-For-You £14.99 (unlimited mailboxes, 500 GB pooled, free domain, we do the setup), Email Pro £19.99 (50 mailboxes, 30 GB each, 1.5 TB pooled) and Email Scale £34.99 (unlimited mailboxes, 1 TB pooled).
Every plan includes unlimited aliases and forwarders, a catch-all address, auto-responders, per-message delivery tracing, and calendars and contacts that sync over CalDAV and CardDAV. Mail is standard IMAP and SMTP, so Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird and every phone client work without special software — and if you ever leave, your mail comes with you. SPF, DKIM and DMARC are configured as standard; how we run the platform is set out on our email deliverability page. Servers sit in our own UK data centres, and backups run daily, kept a rolling five days off-site in a second UK data centre.
Two honest caveats. Our 99.9% uptime figure is a target, not an SLA with service credits — Google's is contractual and ours is not. And we are not a 24/7 call centre: typical replies are around ten minutes between 8am and 5pm, staff are usually about from 5am to midnight every day of the year, but out-of-hours cover is not guaranteed.
Switch if your team mainly uses email, you want role mailboxes without paying per head, your documents live elsewhere, and you would rather your bill did not grow every time you hire.
Stay with Google if your business genuinely runs on Docs and shared drives, you need Meet, archiving or legal hold, you use Groups as mailing lists, or you depend on Gemini inside Gmail. Paying for a platform you actually use is not overpaying.
Migration is free and we do it for you. Mail is copied across intact — folders, read and unread status, dates, attachments — while your existing mailboxes carry on working, and nothing is deleted at the old provider. We change the MX records only once the copy is verified, then run a final catch-up sync. You keep your addresses and your domain throughout, and most small businesses see no interruption at all.
No. It replaces the email part. There is no equivalent of Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, Meet or Gemini, and we do not offer mailing lists or email archiving. If those matter to you, Google Workspace is the better buy.
A domain's MX records point in one direction, so once mail is delivered to us it no longer arrives in Gmail for that domain. Workspace licences can continue for Drive, Docs and Meet alongside that, but you would be paying for both. In practice, most firms that move do so having realised email was nearly all they used.
On paper, yes — though Google's 30 GB is shared between Gmail, Drive and Photos, while ours is mail only. Extra storage is £2 a month per 10 GB block, and Secure Email at £8.99 raises it to 20 GB per mailbox with a 400 GB pool.
Migration runs in parallel and nothing is deleted at the old provider, so there is always a copy to fall back on. Cutover happens only after the copy is verified.
Yes, for three years, in writing, on the plan you sign up to. There is no setup fee, no contract and no renewal jump — and existing customers' prices are never raised.
Every plan, mailbox count and storage figure is on our business email hosting page, migration included and the price held for three years. If you would rather talk it through before moving a live mailbox, call 0330 088 2279 and a person in the UK will answer.
— The UKBox team
