Microsoft and Google charge for every mailbox, every month — and raise the price at renewal. UKBox gives your whole team email on your own domain for one flat price, held for 3 years, on UK servers.
Per-seat pricing means every new starter raises your bill — and the provider raises the rate too. Flat pricing means hiring costs you nothing.
| Your team | Microsoft 365 Business Basic* | UKBox Secure Email |
|---|---|---|
| 5 people | £27.00 /mo + VAT — and rising | £4.99 /mo + VAT — flat |
| 10 people | £54.00 /mo + VAT — and rising | £4.99 /mo + VAT — flat |
| Price in 3 years | Whatever they decide | Held in writing for 36 months |
*£5.40 per user per month ex VAT (list price checked 30 August 2026 on microsoft.com, annual commitment). Source: Microsoft UK commercial price list.
Everyone else charges per mailbox or per user, so their bill climbs with every hire. Here is the cost of professional email for a team of ten — entry business plans, list prices ex VAT as at August 2026.
| Provider | How it's priced | Storage | Team of 10 |
|---|---|---|---|
| UKBox — Starter Email | Flat — not per mailbox | 10 GB per mailbox · 100 GB pooled | £4.99/mo |
| Fasthosts — Mail Basic 25 | Mailbox bundle | 2 GB per mailbox | £4.50/mo — rises at renewal |
| IONOS — Mail Basic | Per mailbox | 2 GB per mailbox | ~£25/mo (after intro) |
| Zoho — Mail Lite | Per user, annual only | 5 GB per user | ~£9/mo |
| GoDaddy — Email Essentials | Per user | 10 GB per user | ~£30/mo |
| Microsoft 365 — Business Basic | Per user | 100 GB per user | ~£50/mo |
| Google Workspace — Starter | Per user | 30 GB per user | ~£66/mo |
Entry business-email plans, list prices ex VAT checked August 2026 — always confirm on each provider's own site. Per-mailbox and per-user prices scale with every person you add, and several rise after the first term. UKBox holds your price for 3 years and pools storage across your whole team.
Set it up yourself in minutes, or have us do every mailbox, every phone and the whole migration for you. Pay annually on any plan and get 2 months free.
We own our servers outright, racked in UK data centres — the hardware is already paid for. Passing you generous, pooled storage costs us next to nothing, so we would rather win your business than charge you per gigabyte like the big cloud names. Fair-use applies, and real business email rarely touches a fraction of it.
We create every mailbox, configure every phone and computer, and move your old email for you — you do nothing.
Every plan includes unlimited aliases & forwarders, catch-all addresses, automatic out-of-office replies, shared calendars & contacts (sync to Outlook, Apple Mail & mobile), SPF, DKIM & DMARC authentication, per-message delivery tracing and daily UK backups. No setup fee · no contract · add 10 GB for £2/month any time.
| Compare the plans | Starter £4.99/mo | Secure £8.99/mo | Done-For-You £14.99/mo | Pro £19.99/mo | Scale £34.99/mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mailboxes | 10 | 20 | Unlimited | 50 | Unlimited |
| Storage per mailbox | 10 GB | 20 GB | shared | 30 GB | 50 GB |
| Pooled storage | 100 GB | 400 GB | 500 GB | 1.5 TB | 1 TB |
| Every mailbox set up for you | — | — | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Free business domain | — | — | ✓ | — | — |
| Priority support | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free zero-loss migration | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Price held 3 years, in writing | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Annual billing: 2 months free | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Losing years of email is the fear that keeps people overpaying. Here's exactly how we make sure it can't happen.
Pick a plan and send your current email login through a secure ticket — never over plain email.
Dedicated migration tooling copies every message, folder and read/unread flag — then we verify the counts match.
Your old inbox stays untouched until you've checked everything arrived. Only then does mail start flowing here.
The technical detail serious buyers ask for — answered plainly, before you move a single mailbox.
| What you're asking | The honest answer |
|---|---|
| What runs the mail? | Industry-standard cPanel with Dovecot (IMAP/POP) and Exim (SMTP) — the same proven stack behind a huge share of the world's business email. Not a resold Microsoft or Google mailbox. |
| Where does my mail live? | On our own servers in UK data centres (London, Coventry and Maidenhead), on UK IP space. Your mailbox content stays in the UK. |
| Authentication & deliverability | SPF, DKIM and DMARC are configured automatically on every domain (DMARC starts in monitoring and is tightened to reject on request). Outbound mail is authenticated and rate-limited to protect sending reputation — and we'll happily give you the sending hostname and IP so you can check reputation yourself before you migrate. |
| Spam & virus protection | Imunify360 plus server-level spam and virus filtering on every mailbox. |
| Aliases, catch-alls & out-of-office | Unlimited aliases and forwarders, catch-all addresses and automatic out-of-office replies on every plan — plus per-message delivery tracing from your control panel, so you can see exactly what happened to any message you sent or were expecting. |
| Backups & recovery | Daily backups with 5 rolling restore points, copied off-site to a second UK data centre. We can restore an individual mailbox or message on request — and we never store your mail and its backup in the same place. |
| Account security | TLS on every connection, Imunify360 protection and encrypted backups. |
| Migration & leaving | Free zero-loss migration in: every message, folder and read/unread flag copied and verified before we switch your MX. Because it's standard IMAP on your own domain, leaving is just as easy — no lock-in. |
| Uptime & support | A genuine 99.9% availability target and track record — we're honest that it isn't a service-credit-backed SLA. Human UK support 5am–midnight, 365 days a year, typically replying within about ten minutes in staffed hours. |
Migrating a serious domain? Ask us for the mail-server hostname, reverse-DNS and sending IP range and we'll send them over — test our deliverability to Gmail, Outlook and the rest before you commit. We'd rather you checked. Full detail: how UKBox email infrastructure & deliverability works →
Straight answers before you order.
Yes — we host email on the domain you already own, keeping every address exactly as it is. No domain yet? Done-For-You includes one free.
We migrate it free with dedicated tools that copy every message, folder and read/unread flag, and we verify the counts match before anything switches over.
Really. Starter Email includes 10 mailboxes and Secure Email 20, both in one flat price; Done-For-You has no mailbox limit at all.
Both, in the best way. Each mailbox has a generous per-mailbox allowance — 10 GB on Starter, up to 30 GB on Email Pro — and every mailbox pools into one shared total (100 GB on Starter, up to 1.5 TB on Pro). A busy mailbox can go past its own allowance and simply draw from the shared pool, so nobody gets locked out.
Nothing breaks. Because storage is pooled, a heavy mailbox just draws from the shared total. If you would rather ring-fence each person, you can set individual mailbox limits yourself in the control panel — but out of the box it is one shared pot.
We own our servers outright, racked in UK data centres, so the hardware is already paid for. Passing you generous, pooled storage costs us next to nothing — we would rather win your business than charge per gigabyte like the big cloud names. Fair-use applies, and real business email rarely touches a fraction of it.
Anything that speaks IMAP or POP: Outlook, Apple Mail, Gmail's app, Thunderbird, iPhone and Android mail — plus Pro Webmail in any browser.
Any time. No contracts, no exit fees — and your email is yours to export.
Yes — all three are configured on your domain. SPF and DKIM automatically, plus a DMARC record; we set DMARC to monitor by default and tighten it to reject unauthenticated mail on request.
Yes. Shared calendars and contacts sync to Outlook, Apple Mail and Calendar and mobile devices over CalDAV and CardDAV. For Teams, SharePoint and the Office apps, Microsoft 365 is the right choice — we’ll tell you so.
As many as you like. Aliases and forwarders (info@, sales@, accounts@) are unlimited on every plan, so one person can own several addresses without using several mailboxes. Only count the people who need their own login.
Yes — both are included on every plan. A catch-all collects mail sent to any address at your domain, automatic replies cover out-of-office, and you can trace what happened to any individual message from your control panel. More on how our email platform works.
Daily, kept for a rolling 5 days and copied off-site to a second UK data centre — so a problem in one location can never take your mail and its backup together.
We run to a 99.9% uptime target with UK infrastructure monitored 365 days a year and a live status page. There’s no contract and no minimum term — your domain and mail stay yours and you can cancel any time from the client area.
Set up in minutes, or let us do the whole thing for you.
Get startedStraight, useful reading — no fluff.
