Search “GoDaddy Microsoft 365 pricing” and you’ll find procurement analysts using the phrase “convenience tax” without much hesitation. That’s not a small business blogger being cute, it’s Vendr, a company that tracks what businesses actually pay across thousands of real contracts.

Their data puts GoDaddy’s real-world Email Essentials rate at $5.99 per mailbox per month, a figure UK pricing tends to mirror pound for pound rather than convert properly, against a headline £1.99 shown at checkout.

That gap between the promotional pricing that gets you to click “Add to Cart” and the number that dings your card a year later is the whole story with GoDaddy email. Here’s what that means next to Zoho Mail, including the one area where GoDaddy genuinely does something the cheaper web hosts don’t.

GoDaddy’s Email Essentials: The Price That Isn’t the Price

GoDaddy’s UK checkout shows three relevant tiers. Email Essentials starts at £1.99 per mailbox per month for the first year, 10GB storage, webmail and Outlook access, no Office apps. Email Plus doubles the storage to 50GB for £3.29 in year one. Online Business Essentials, the recommended tier, adds web versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint plus Microsoft Teams for £6.99 in year one.

None of those three renewal prices are published anywhere on GoDaddy’s own pricing page. What is published, buried in GoDaddy’s own help documentation and confirmed independently by Vendr’s aggregated contract data, is that Email Essentials renews at roughly $5.99 a mailbox, a three-fold jump from the £1.99 headline.

Zoho doesn’t run a teaser rate at all. Mail Lite is £0.80 a month whether it’s your first month or your fortieth, so there’s no renewal cliff to budget around in the first place.

GoDaddy doesn’t publish a renewal figure for Online Business Essentials on its UK site either. Vendr’s dataset lists a comparable US tier, Business Basic, at $6 a month, close to the £6.99 year-one price, which suggests the renewal jump on this tier may be smaller than on Email Essentials. Worth confirming directly with GoDaddy before you commit, since the company’s own published pricing won’t tell you.

The One Thing GoDaddy Gets Right

Fair’s fair: unlike IONOS and Fasthosts, GoDaddy’s email is genuine Microsoft 365 underneath, and Microsoft 365’s admin tools support distribution groups and shared mailboxes properly, documented clearly in GoDaddy’s own help centre, available without buying extra licenses. If distribution groups are a must-have and you’re set on a Microsoft 365 flavour of email specifically, GoDaddy won’t leave you guessing the way the other two web hosts do.

What GoDaddy adds on top of Microsoft’s own pricing is the mark-up. One independent analysis found GoDaddy charging $9.99 to $11.99 a month for a mailbox tier that costs roughly $4 to $4.80 a month bought directly, a premium of around 150% for functionally the same product. Microsoft’s own UK price for that same Business Standard tier, bought direct with no reseller in between, is £10.80 a month with the full desktop apps included. You’re not paying for something GoDaddy built. You’re paying GoDaddy to be the middleman between you and Microsoft, and that middleman fee compounds every year you stay.

Leaving GoDaddy Without Losing Anything

Because GoDaddy’s email is genuine Microsoft 365, migrating away from it works the same as migrating away from any Microsoft 365 tenant: export or forward what you need, then update the MX records once you’re ready to cut over. Zoho’s side of the move uses standard IMAP, so mail, contacts and calendars come across without anything exotic. The part people underestimate is Office file formats. If your team has been saving documents natively in Word or Excel through GoDaddy’s bundled apps, those files open fine in Zoho Writer and Sheet, but double-check formatting on anything with complex layouts before you delete the originals. Budget a day for the switch on a small team, and do it a few weeks ahead of your GoDaddy renewal date so you’re not charged for a service you’ve already left.

What GoDaddy’s Own Customers Say

GoDaddy holds a solid 4.5 out of 5 on Trustpilot from more than 128,000 reviews, and 4.0 out of 5 on G2. The complaints that do surface cluster tightly around one theme: renewal pricing catching people off guard, along with auto-renewal charges that are hard to reverse. GoDaddy shortened its refund window from 30 days to 7 days in February 2025, which narrows the grace period for spotting an unwanted renewal before it’s too late to easily undo.

Where Zoho Pulls Ahead

Storage again favours Zoho at the entry tier, and the bigger gap is what’s bundled in for free. Mail Lite includes a calendar, a to-do list and Cliq, Zoho’s Slack-style chat tool, none of which GoDaddy’s Email Essentials touches.

Zoho’s admin console also runs genuine conditional routing rules, filtering by sender, subject or content, right at Mail Lite’s price point.

GoDaddy’s Microsoft 365 layer can do something similar, since it’s real Exchange underneath, but that capability lives behind the pricier tiers and the Exchange admin center’s own learning curve, not the £1.99 headline price. Step up to Workplace Standard and £2.40 a month plus VAT gets you Word, Excel and PowerPoint equivalents alongside the mailbox, for a third of what GoDaddy charges for its nearest comparable tier, and without the reseller markup sitting on top.

Can You Hand This to a Third Party?

Credit where it’s due here too: Compared to Ionos and Fasthosts, GoDaddy is the one of these three where third-party delegation is actually well built. Its Delegate Access system lets you invite someone to manage “Products & Domains” in your account without ever seeing your billing, payment details or password, and the invitation runs through the delegate’s own GoDaddy login rather than yours.

Separately, the Microsoft 365 admin side runs on its own Exchange admin credentials, entirely apart from your core GoDaddy login. If you were going to trust a third party with account access on any of the three web hosts covered in this series, GoDaddy’s is the most workable.

It still isn’t quite as direct as Zoho, where a client adds a specialist as a custom administrator inside the Zoho Mail console itself, scoped to email specifically, in a single step rather than GoDaddy’s separate delegate-invitation and Microsoft-credential dance.

Skip the Reseller, Get It Set Up Right

If Microsoft 365’s ecosystem genuinely matters to your business, buying it directly rather than through a domain registrar avoids the markup entirely. If it doesn’t, Zoho gets you further for less, provided it’s configured properly from day one. Our Zoho email maintenance service covers exactly that: Zoho Mail setup with SPF, DKIM and DMARC done correctly, distribution groups that work as expected, and ongoing admin so renewal surprises aren’t something you have to think about. Get in touch to talk through your options.

We’ve also compared Zoho against IONOS and Fasthosts, if you’re weighing up more than one option.