How to Get a Business Email With Your Own Domain in 2026: 11 Options From Free to £7 a Month (Google Workspace, Zoho, Jobbit)

You have the business name, the van and the first customers, and your email address is still the one you made at college, with a number in it. Every quote goes out from it, every supplier replies to it, and the one customer who typed it from your card got a bounce because they spelt it wrong. A business email with your own domain, name@yourbusiness.co.uk, costs between nothing and about £7 a month, takes an afternoon to set up once, and changes how every message you send is read.

The prices are lower than most people think. Google Workspace's Business Starter plan is £5.90 a user a month on an annual commitment in the UK (£7.00 month to month, both before VAT), Microsoft 365 Business Basic is £5.40 after the price rise of 1 July 2026, Zoho Mail has a genuinely free plan for up to five users, IONOS starts at £1 a month, and Cloudflare will forward unlimited addresses on your domain to an inbox you already have for nothing (all checked on the providers' own pages on 3 October 2026). The domain itself is about £7 a year for a .co.uk. This guide compares 11 options, explains the four DNS records that make the mail arrive, and shows the one message that gets an AI agent to do the whole setup.

Why name@yourbusiness beats a free address

Three practical reasons, none of them about vanity. First, trust: a quote from accounts@smithplumbing.co.uk reads as a company, and a quote from smithyplumb1987@ reads as a bloke with a van, even when they are the same bloke with the same van. Second, control: the address belongs to you, so when you change provider, hire someone or sell the business, the address stays and the history goes with it. Third, deliverability: a domain you authenticate properly with the records below lands in inboxes; a free address sending invoices with PDF attachments to strangers is exactly what spam filters are tuned to doubt.

The domain comes first. If you do not have one yet, Best Place to Buy a Domain Name in the UK covers the renewal-price traps and what a .co.uk should cost. Then choose from the options below.

11 ways to get business email on your domain, compared

Prices are the providers' own, in their own currencies, on 3 October 2026; dollar prices are billed in dollars. VAT applies to the UK business plans.

The free route: forwarding plus the inbox you already have

Cloudflare Email Routing receives mail for any address on a domain whose DNS sits with Cloudflare (free) and forwards it to an address you already own, with no volume limit and a catch-all rule so that typos still arrive. It takes ten minutes and costs nothing. The limit is sending: replies come from your Gmail address unless you set up Gmail's "send mail as" with a working SMTP server, and Cloudflare does not provide one. Many sole traders live with that: they receive at hello@theirdomain and reply from Gmail with the name set correctly. For the first year of a business it is enough; the day you want replies to come from the domain too, move to one of the paid rows.

Zoho's free plan is the other genuinely free route, with real mailboxes rather than forwarding, up to five users with 5 GB each, as long as you are happy with the web and mobile apps rather than connecting Outlook or Apple Mail.

The £1 to £5 route: IONOS, Zoho Lite, Fastmail

If you want proper mailboxes that work in any mail app, the cheap tier is good now. IONOS sells five accounts at £1 a month for the first year (£2.50 after), with a domain included, which makes it the cheapest full package in the UK; the mailboxes are small at 2 GB. Zoho Mail Lite at about a dollar a month adds IMAP and a calendar to the free plan. Fastmail is the enthusiasts' choice: quick, well filtered, with excellent rules, at $3 a month for 2 GB or $5 for 30 GB. None of these includes documents, video calls or shared drives, and for a one-person business that is often exactly right.

The proper route: Google Workspace or Microsoft 365

For a business with staff, clients who send calendar invitations and documents to share, the two suites earn their £5 to £7 a month. Google Workspace Business Starter gives Gmail on your domain, 30 GB a user, Meet, Drive, Docs and Sheets, and an admin console to add and remove people. Microsoft 365 Business Basic gives Outlook with a 50 GB mailbox, Teams, the web versions of Word and Excel, 1 TB of OneDrive and the admin centre, at £5.40 a user a month since July 2026. Choose by your customers: if they send Teams invitations, choose Microsoft; if they share Google Docs, choose Google; if neither, Google Workspace is the easier one to run alone. Both are billed before VAT and both charge more for the desktop Office apps or the AI add-ons.

The four DNS records that make your mail arrive

Every provider gives you records to paste into your domain's DNS. They look like gibberish and they are not optional:

• MX records tell the world which server receives mail for your domain. Wrong MX, no incoming mail.
• SPF is a text record listing which servers may send mail for your domain. Without it, receivers suspect forgery.
• DKIM is a signature your provider adds to every message so the receiver can verify it was not altered. The provider gives you a key to publish.
• DMARC tells receivers what to do when SPF or DKIM fails (nothing, quarantine or reject) and where to send reports. Start with a monitoring policy, then tighten it.

Set all four on day one. Since 2024, Google and Yahoo have required SPF and DKIM, plus DMARC for bulk senders, before they will deliver mail reliably, and the same checks are what decide whether your invoice lands in a customer's inbox or their spam folder. Changes take minutes to a few hours to spread. Send a test to a Gmail address and a Microsoft address, then open the message headers and look for "pass" next to spf, dkim and dmarc.

Which addresses to create

Keep it short and keep it few. A one-person business needs name@ for personal correspondence and hello@ or info@ for the public address on the website; add accounts@ the day invoices go out from someone other than you. Make hello@ and accounts@ aliases or a shared inbox rather than separate paid users, so they cost nothing extra and you see everything in one place. Turn on a catch-all for the first year so that a customer who writes to sales@ or jon@ still reaches you, then switch it off once the spam arrives. Never put a person's name on the address printed on the van; people leave, the van stays.

How an AI agent sets it up in one message

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Manus and Meta's Muse can all explain DNS records and draft a signature. Where Jobbit differs is that the agent does the work in its own workspace and checks it:

• The domain. Buy a .co.uk for about £7 a year on Jobbit or connect one you already own; the agent reads the current records first.
• The records, written and checked. Give it the provider and it produces the exact MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC entries, pastes them where it has access, and verifies them once they have spread.
• The addresses. Which to create, which to alias, which to catch-all, with a reason for each.
• The signature and the auto-reply. In your voice, with your logo resized correctly for email, plus an out-of-office that does not sound like a robot.
• The website on the same domain. A one-page site with a contact form that posts to hello@, hosted with a custom domain on the Go plan at £7 a month. How to Get a Free Website for Your Business covers the site side.
• A person when it needs one. Migrating ten years of mail out of an old provider is a job for an IT freelancer, and Jobbit can bring one in from the same place, with payment held in escrow until it is done.

Margaret, 64, took early retirement from a council and started a dog-grooming business from her garage. She had a Hotmail address and a Facebook page. The first message bought margaretsgrooming.co.uk and set up Zoho's free plan with hello@ and bookings@; the second wrote the DNS records and tested them; the third built the one-page site with a booking form. The email was the smallest thing the agent did, and it was the thing that made the business look like one. If you are still deciding whether you need the domain at all, Can an AI Agent Really Build Your Website? answers the bigger question.

Mistakes that cost people their mail

• Email from the web host. It works until you move host, and then every address dies with it. Keep mail and hosting separate.
• Buying the domain through the mail provider's bundle without checking the renewal: the "free" domain renews at full price and is awkward to move.
• No SPF or DKIM. Invoices in spam, and no idea why.
• An SPF record with too many includes. Receivers stop evaluating after ten lookups and treat the result as a failure.
• DMARC set to reject on day one. Legitimate mail from a service you forgot about gets bounced. Start with monitoring.
• A person's name on the public address. They leave; the address is on 2,000 leaflets.
• Letting the domain lapse. Set renewal to automatic and put the renewal date in two calendars.
• Forwarding only, forever. Replies from a Gmail address undo the trust you bought the domain for.

A 30-minute plan to get name@yourbusiness today

• Minutes 0 to 5: the domain. Buy it or find the login for the one you have. Note where its DNS is managed.
• Minutes 5 to 10: the provider. Free forwarding or Zoho for now; Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 if you have staff or clients on them.
• Minutes 10 to 20: the records. Paste MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC, or ask the agent to write and check them.
• Minutes 20 to 25: the test. Send to a Gmail and a Microsoft address, read the headers, look for three passes.
• Minutes 25 to 30: the finish. Signature, auto-reply, the address on the website and the van. Then stop giving out the old one.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a business email address cost in the UK?

From nothing to about £7 a user a month. Cloudflare forwarding and Zoho's free plan cost nothing beyond the domain (about £7 a year for a .co.uk); IONOS starts at £1 a month; Microsoft 365 Business Basic is £5.40 and Google Workspace Business Starter £5.90 to £7.00 a user a month, all before VAT, as published in October 2026.

Can I get a business email address for free?

Yes, two ways: forward addresses on your domain to an inbox you already have with Cloudflare Email Routing, or use Zoho Mail's free plan for up to five real mailboxes. Both need you to own a domain, and the forwarding route sends replies from your existing address unless you set up "send mail as".

Do I need Google Workspace to have email on my domain?

No. Any of the providers above gives you addresses on your own domain. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 add calendars, documents, video calls and an admin console, which is why businesses with staff choose them.

What are MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC?

The four DNS records that make your mail work: MX says where to deliver it, SPF lists who may send it, DKIM signs each message, and DMARC tells receivers what to do if the first two fail. Set all four on day one or your invoices go to spam.

Can I keep my old Gmail address?

Yes. Forward it to the new address, or add the new domain to the same Gmail account with "send mail as", and give out only the new one. Most people run both for a year and then let the old one go quiet.

Should the address be my name or hello@?

Both: your name for correspondence, hello@ or info@ for the website and the van, accounts@ once invoices go out. Make the generic ones aliases so they cost nothing and land in one inbox.

What is the fastest way to set up business email on my domain?

One message to an AI agent that can see your domain: say which provider you chose and it writes the DNS records, checks them, drafts the signature and auto-reply, and builds the site on the same domain. On Jobbit the Free plan gives 100 credits a day with no card.