What you're actually buying
“Business email” means an address ending in your own domain — you@yourbusiness.co.uk — rather than a gmail.com or hotmail.co.uk one. Underneath, you're paying for three things: a mailbox to store the mail, a server that sends it, and the settings that let other mail servers verify the message really came from you. That third one is invisible, free with any proper provider, and the reason the cheapest workarounds fall over.
What the main options cost
UK list prices, checked 15 September 2026, all per user per month on an annual commitment. VAT is added on top of every figure in the left column.
| Option | Per user/month ex VAT | Per year inc VAT | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mailboxes with UK hosting | £0 | £0 | Unlimited at Mythic Beasts and Krystal; 10 on 20i's entry plan |
| Zoho Mail free plan | £0 | £0 | Up to 5 users, 5GB each — but no IMAP or POP |
| Exchange Online Plan 1 | £3.10 | £44.64 | 50GB mailbox + 50GB archive. Real Exchange, works in Outlook and on phones |
| Microsoft 365 Business Basic | £5.40 | £77.76 | 100GB mailbox, plus Teams, web Office apps, 1TB OneDrive |
| Google Workspace Business Starter | £5.90 | £84.96 | 30GB pooled storage per user |
| Microsoft 365 Business Basic, month-to-month | £6.48 | £93.31 | Exactly 20% more for no commitment |
| Google Workspace Business Standard | £11.80 | £169.92 | 2TB pooled storage per user |
| GoDaddy M365 Email Plus — renewal | £7.99 | — | Introductory £3.29. Same Microsoft product, resold |
The one worth knowing about: Exchange Online Plan 1, £3.10 a month. It's proper hosted Exchange from Microsoft — works in Outlook, syncs to your phone, 50GB mailbox, spam filtering, phone support. What you don't get, compared with Business Basic at £5.40, is Teams, the web Office apps and OneDrive. If all you want is an email address that works, it's the cheapest honest answer from a tier-one provider, and it is barely advertised.
The free routes, and which ones actually work
Mailboxes included with hosting. This is the most underrated option and the industry is quiet about it because the industry sells the alternative. A competent UK host gives you IMAP, SMTP, webmail, spam filtering and unlimited addresses at no extra cost on hosting you are already paying for. Mythic Beasts includes “unlimited POP3/IMAP mailboxes” from £2.50 + VAT a month; Krystal includes unlimited mailboxes with IMAP, SMTP, forwarders and aliases on every plan.
The honest limitations, in the order they actually bite: hourly sending caps (Krystal's entry plan allows 500 emails an hour — fine for replying to customers, a wall if you ever send a mailing list); shared sending reputation, because your mail leaves via an IP shared with the host's other customers; and storage shared with your website's disk allowance. Worth saying plainly: the “it won't sync to your phone” criticism is not true of hosting mailboxes — IMAP is standard and phone mail apps work fine. Also worth saying: every source making the shared-reputation argument was selling a fix for it, and no independent measurement of how often it actually bites a small business exists.
Zoho Mail's free plan is real: up to five users, 5GB each, custom email on one domain, forever free, no card needed. The catch is precise and disqualifying for many people — Zoho's own page states “IMAP/ POP/ Active Sync not included”. That means no Outlook, no Apple Mail, no ordinary phone mail app. You use Zoho's webmail or Zoho's own app. If that suits you it is genuinely free and genuinely works. If you want your email in the Mail app on your iPhone, it is a non-starter.
Email forwarding from a registrar or Cloudflare is free and useful, but receive-only. Namecheap includes up to 100 forwarding addresses and says so plainly: it “does not allow creating fully-featured email accounts and sending outgoing emails”. Cloudflare Email Routing is free with 200 routing rules per domain and 200 verified destination addresses, and likewise only forwards inbound mail.
The free workaround, and why it's ending
The standard trick is: forward your business address to Gmail for free, then use Gmail's “Send mail as” to reply as your business address. Two things are wrong with it, and the second one is new.
First, it doesn't quite work even now. Google's own page explains that sending this way routes through the other provider's server — you must supply “the SMTP server ... and the username and password on that account”. If you only set up free forwarding, there is no mail provider and therefore no server to enter. And even when it does work, Google warns: “If your recipient uses Outlook or another mail service, they might see something like, ‘From yourname@gmail.com on behalf of othername@otherdomain.com’.” Your personal address also leaks through out-of-office replies and filters.
The reason is worth understanding once. SPF, DKIM and DMARC are three settings in your domain's DNS that together let a receiving mail server answer one question: was this message really sent by someone allowed to send for this domain? When a message says it's from your business domain but was actually sent and signed by somewhere else, that check fails. The receiving server can't verify you, so it shows the “on behalf of” wording, or drops you in spam. Nothing has broken — the system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. Free forwarding gets your mail in. It gives you nothing to prove who you are on the way out.
Second, and this is the part nobody has written up: Google is removing it. Google's own help documentation states: “Starting January 2027: Send emails from third-party email address support ends... You will no longer be able to send mail from third-party email accounts in Gmail on the web or in the Gmail mobile apps.” Gmailify and checking mail from other accounts by POP go at the same time.
Google's published timeline puts the transition period in the second half of 2026 — where we are now — and says that during it “Gmail may restrict new configurations”. So anyone setting this up today may find it refused, and will definitely lose it by January. Google Workspace “send as” is unaffected; this is about free consumer Gmail.
Buying through a host, a builder or a registrar
Through a host, often the best deal there is, because it's included. Through a builder or a registrar, usually not.
Wix doesn't run its own email — it resells Google Workspace. It states plainly that “Wix business email is not free”, but publishes no price anywhere public; you only see it once you're logged in. That opacity is itself worth knowing before you build there.
Squarespace still sells Google Workspace with a first-year-free offer, and its terms are a clean example of the pattern: one free user per website, Starter plan only, you must sign up within the first year, and — in Squarespace's words — “after the first year of service, your Google Workspace account renews at the standard rate”, with instructions to disable auto-renew if you don't want to be charged.
GoDaddy is the sharpest example. Its business email is “powered by Microsoft 365” — the same underlying product Microsoft sells directly:
| Plan | Introductory | Renews at |
|---|---|---|
| M365 Email Essentials (10GB) | £1.99/mailbox/mo | — |
| M365 Email Plus (50GB) | £3.29/mailbox/mo | £7.99/mailbox/mo |
| M365 Online Business Essentials | £6.99/mailbox/mo | £11.99/mailbox/mo |
Compare those renewal figures with Microsoft's own UK prices — £5.40 for Business Basic, £3.10 for Exchange Online Plan 1. Buying the identical Microsoft service directly from Microsoft costs materially less once year one ends.
Does a proper email address actually make a difference?
You will see a lot of confident statistics on this. Here is what happens when you follow them back.
Almost all of them trace to a single source: a survey of 1,000 American adults, conducted by OnePoll in February 2016, commissioned by GoDaddy — a company that sells email addresses. Its findings were that 75% thought a domain-based email address was very to extremely important, and that a third doubted a seller's legitimacy when they used a personal address. That is a PR poll, a decade old, in another country, measuring stated attitudes rather than behaviour.
It doesn't make the conclusion wrong. It does mean it isn't strong evidence, and this guide isn't going to pretend otherwise. Worth flagging too: the widely-repeated claim that customers are “9 times more likely” to choose a business with a professional email address does not appear in that survey and cannot be traced to any study. It looks like a distortion of the “three times more important than social media” line. Don't repeat it, and be wary of whoever quoted it at you.
The arguments that are documented are in the next two sections: the deliverability rules, and what happens when you leave.
The rules that actually bite now
Since 1 February 2024, Google and Yahoo have applied requirements to everyone who emails their users, with no minimum volume at all. Sending one email to a Gmail address puts you in scope. You need SPF or DKIM on your sending domain, valid forward and reverse DNS, a TLS connection, and a spam-complaint rate below 0.3%. Unauthenticated mail “might be marked as spam or rejected”.
There's a second, stricter tier for anyone sending 5,000 or more messages a day to Gmail: SPF and DKIM, plus DMARC (Google confirms “your DMARC enforcement policy can be set to none”), plus alignment, plus one-click unsubscribe on marketing mail. Microsoft brought in a comparable 5,000-a-day rule for outlook.com, hotmail.com and live.com from 5 May 2025.
So is a sole trader affected? Partly, and most articles get this wrong in both directions. You are far below every bulk threshold, so DMARC, alignment and one-click unsubscribe aren't required of you. But the all-sender rules have no volume floor, so SPF or DKIM is not optional.
In practice, if you buy email from Google, Microsoft, Zoho, Fastmail or a competent host, this is configured for you and you'll never know it exists. The people genuinely exposed are the ones sending from a custom domain bolted onto a free consumer account, or from a domain with no mail provider and therefore no authentication at all. The rules don't punish being small. They punish being unauthenticated.
What happens when you leave
This is where the distinction nobody explains matters: your domain and your mailbox are two separate purchases that feel like one thing. If you own yourbusiness.co.uk, the address is yours permanently — you can point it at a different provider in an afternoon and carry on printing it on the van. What you can't automatically take is the mail already sitting in the mailbox. The address is portable. The archive is what's held.
Google is explicit: “After you cancel your Google Workspace subscription, your users' Google Workspace data will be deleted and can't be restored”, and tells you to “download any user data you want to save” using its Data Export tool before cancelling. There's no fee — but there is a deadline, and it's before you press cancel, not after.
Hosting-bundled mailboxes disappear with the hosting, but because they're standard IMAP the escape is straightforward and free: connect the account to Thunderbird, Outlook or Apple Mail, let it download everything, then drag it into the new account.
Builder-bundled email is the tightest, because two things stack — the mailbox depends on the subscription, and the billing relationship sits with the builder rather than with Google or Microsoft. None of Wix, Squarespace or GoDaddy publishes what happens to the mailbox if you cancel the site plan or move the domain away. That silence is the finding: ask before you buy, and get the answer in writing.
What to do this week
If you're using a gmail.com or hotmail.co.uk address for your business, the cheapest fix is probably already paid for — log into your hosting control panel and see whether mailboxes are included. If they are, creating one takes ten minutes.
If you're on the forward-to-Gmail workaround, start planning now rather than in January. And if you're buying Microsoft 365 email through a reseller, check what it renews at against Microsoft's own price.
Common questions
- How much does business email cost in the UK?
- The cheapest route from a tier-one provider is Microsoft's Exchange Online Plan 1 at £3.10 per user per month excluding VAT — £44.64 a year including VAT. Microsoft 365 Business Basic is £5.40 and Google Workspace Business Starter is £5.90, both per user per month excluding VAT on an annual commitment. If you already pay for web hosting, mailboxes are often included at no extra cost.
- Can I get a business email address for free?
- Three ways, each with a real catch. Mailboxes included with web hosting are genuinely free and fully functional — Mythic Beasts and Krystal both include unlimited mailboxes with IMAP. Zoho Mail's free plan covers up to five users on one domain but has no IMAP, POP or ActiveSync, so it will not work in Outlook or your phone's mail app. Email forwarding from Cloudflare or a registrar is free but receive-only — you cannot send from it.
- Is Google changing how business email works in Gmail?
- Yes. Google's own help documentation states that from January 2027 “send emails from third-party email address support ends” — you will no longer be able to send mail from non-Google accounts in Gmail on the web or in the mobile apps. Gmailify and checking mail from other accounts by POP go at the same time. The transition period is running now, and Google says it “may restrict new configurations” during it.
- How much does business email cost with Google?
- Google Workspace UK list prices are £5.90 per user per month for Business Starter, £11.80 for Business Standard and £18.40 for Business Plus, all excluding VAT, with 16% off for a one-year commitment. Starter for one person is £70.80 a year before VAT, or £84.96 with it.
- Is it cheaper to buy email through my web host or builder?
- Through a host, often yes — many include mailboxes free. Through a builder or registrar, usually no. GoDaddy resells Microsoft 365 email at £1.99 to £6.99 a mailbox introductory, renewing at £7.99 to £11.99 — against Microsoft's own UK price of £5.40 for Business Basic and £3.10 for Exchange Online Plan 1. It is the same underlying Microsoft product either way.
- What happens to my email if I leave my provider?
- The address is portable, the archive is not. If you own your domain you can point it at any provider and keep the address permanently. What you can lose is the mail sitting in the mailbox. Google states that after cancelling Workspace “your users' Google Workspace data will be deleted and can't be restored”, and tells you to export before you cancel. With standard IMAP mailboxes you can download everything to a desktop mail program first.
The rest of this set
Prices checked 15 September 2026: Microsoft UK store (Business plan comparison, Business Basic, Exchange Online plan comparison); Google Workspace UK pricing page; Zoho Mail pricing; Fastmail pricing; Krystal and Mythic Beasts hosting pages; GoDaddy UK professional business email; Squarespace's Google Workspace offer documentation; Wix business email page and support article; Namecheap email forwarding knowledgebase; Cloudflare Email Routing limits. Rules and policies quoted from Google's Email sender guidelines, Google's “Send emails from a different address” and Gmail feature-change help pages, Yahoo's sender best practices, and Google's Workspace cancellation documentation. Zoho's and Proton's paid GBP prices could not be read from their pages and are not quoted here. The trust survey is OnePoll for GoDaddy, February 2016, 1,000 US adults; the widely-quoted “9 times” claim could not be traced to any study.