A client sees your email address before they see a single piece of your work. It is on the enquiry form, the quote, the invoice and the contract. Treat it as the first line of the portfolio.
What a client reads before the work
A producer receives two quotes for the same job. One comes from anna@kellerstudio.com and one from a personal address with a number in it. The second quote can be better and the work behind it can be better, and the producer will still open the first one with a little more confidence. That is not fair, and it is how people read email.
Your address is also the only part of your brand you cannot redesign later without losing something. Change the logo and nobody minds. Change the address and every client, every gallery and every printer has the old one. Get it on your own domain now, so the address you put on this year's invoices is the one you still have in ten years.
One address per door, not per person
A studio of one still has several doors. Enquiries should reach hello@, invoices should come from billing@ so they are easy to find in an accountant's inbox, and press or gallery correspondence deserves its own line. Photographers add bookings@ and often one address per large project so the client thread stays clean. On a provider that charges per user, each of those is a seat, and the studio ends up paying for five people. On a flat plan they are free, so build as many doors as the work has.
Faivelo is $6 a month for unlimited mailboxes on your domain, or $60 a year, and the DNS records are placed at your registrar for you, which matters when the last time you looked at a DNS panel was never.
The signature is a piece of design too
Most email signatures are a font and a phone number. Yours should not be, and it should render the same on the client's phone as it did in your browser. Set it once in webmail so the studio's mark, your name and one link appear under every message from every device, then leave it alone. Restraint reads as confidence here the same way it does on a portfolio site.
While you are there, turn on a proper out-of-office for shoot days and delivery weeks. Clients forgive silence when they were told to expect it.
When the studio grows
A second designer, a retoucher for the busy season, an intern from the college. Each gets a real address in the time it takes to type it, and loses it the day they leave with no change to the bill. When the work outgrows 10 GB of storage, the next plan is $12 a month for 200 GB, and it also brings the newsletter most studios eventually send and a calendar for the bookings.
What you should not need is a suite. A studio's documents live in Figma, Lightroom and a folder of PDFs, not in the email provider's office apps. Pay for email that does email well and lets you keep the tools you already love.
Change the logo and nobody minds. Change the address and every client has the old one.
The address that matches the work
Put the studio on its own domain this afternoon: hello@, billing@ and one address per project, for one flat price. Fourteen days free, no card.