14 ms·

I'm a Google employee who just found out about this. I'm not annoyed that I have to pay, it's been ~13 years of free service and I don't think Google is obligat

I'm a Google employee who just found out about this. I'm not annoyed that I have to pay, it's been ~13 years of free service and I don't think Google is obligated to continue providing this to me. The annoying part is that Google doesn't provide any migration tool, but there are migration tools for Google Edu accounts so that graduating students can migrate their data to personal Google accounts. The software is evidently mostly written and tested, but for whatever reason it hasn't been brought over the finish line for other workspace users. Obviously our use case isn't that common (it's been "legacy" for years) but still annoying to know that there's probably some script I could run to do this, but nobody has built the web UI for it.

treesknees 5y ago
The problem is, I'm not a freeloader despite having my free account for almost 13 years. I was a proud owner of Nexus phones, Google Fi subscriber, Google Music (YouTube Premium) subscriber, I've purchased apps and tv content on Google Play, and I also started paying for Google Drive storage after they removed the free unlimited photo backups. I had YouTube TV for a time. Having a powerful Gsuite service was a driving factor into the Google ecosystem for me. I've been slowly pulling out of Google's services as they've been shutdown, renamed, etc. This will be the ultimate drive off of their services for me. By wanting an extra $6/month/user, they are now losing out on a lot more. I'm sure that my situation isn't unique.
- quesomaster9000 5y ago
  The long-tail isn't being considered here IMO. Dyn.com (nee DynDNS, in the dialup days) was bought out by Oracle, my nearly 20 year old lifetime VIP account will be terminated in May despite using a few thousand requests per month and in the past highly recommending their extortionately priced but rather excellent global load balancer and enterprise anycast services (to the tune of thousands of dollars per month). Likewise with Google, I had an original G1 phone and several iterations of the Pixel, have migrated several companies over to their excellent their cloud offerings, again to the tune of tens of thousands per month. It just feels like I'm getting the shitty end of the stick here. In both cases I could've done it cheaper myself with other providers, and had to strongly argue that the alternative (Dyn, Google Cloud, AWS etc.) is a pragmatic and possibly the best albeit expensive choice in the long-run.
  - t0mas88 5y ago
    Ah yes, we used Dyn global load balancer 10 years ago. It was a great solution at the time. But they kept their high prices while AWS started offering more flexible solutions at 1/100th of the Dyn price.
  - mianos 5y ago
    Identical situations, VIP dyndns, all Nexus phones, 3 Pixels and google apps. On the plus side, I can't think of any other free service I use. (Damn, just remembered I use the hobbyist license for fusion360, they are slowly crippling that but not a big bang). What are you going to do for DNS? I just got static DNS for home so I guess I could host my own DNS but the custom gapps domain mail will be a hassle. Maybe just forward it to my other @gmail account? Luckily I never trusted this to stay free (for all 10 years I think), so I never used the calendar or drive, just the email.
    - collin128 5y ago
      Check out https://improvmx.com/ https://improvmx.com/
      - mianos 5y ago
        Thanks. The free tier looks good. The only issue I have is I use a different alias for every account so I think I'd run out with only 25.
        tijtij 5y ago
        By default it sets up a wild card local-part so any and all email sent to your domain will be forwarded. So you don't have to predefine aliases for every online account/service that use. What the 25 aliases allotted in the free tier allows you to do is have 25 different domains.
        cx42net 5y ago
        Hi! I'm ImprovMX's founder. You are correct that you'd reach the limit of 5 free alias in your case. Upgrading to the monthly plan at 9$ would allow you to have up to 100 aliases. Happy to answer any questions that you might need!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
acegopher 5y ago
I was an early "GMail for domains" user, and have felt abandoned as there are services in Google Home I can't use as a "Workspace" account. I would gladly transition to a @gmail.com account and just do an email forward, which is why I had originally signed up, IF ONLY GOOGLE WOULD HAVE A MIGRATION TOOL. They pushed my family into Workspace as they abandoned us, and give us NO OPTION to transfer 13+ years of history.
- agentx3r 5y ago
  Yes, making me migrate manually means I'm very likely to migrate to Outlook365
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
signal11 5y ago
Is there an equivalent of Microsoft’s Home Use Program (HUP) for Google Workspace? HUP gets you Microsoft 365 (Office apps, OneDrive, ad-free email with a 50GB quota and one custom domain) for your family, with 30% off list price for people using Microsoft solutions at work — which is most office workers, assuming their employers have opted in. It’d be nice to see something similar from Google.
- tyingq 5y ago
  The 365 Family plan is $99/year, total (not per person), for up to 6 people, and you can use your own domain.
  - 422long 5y ago
    Funny.. I was apparently already paying for this and never knew it came with email. Too bad there is a 6 person hard limit as I need 7 accounts. Just tested a bit and it looks like only domains with DNS hosted by Godaddy work with this.
    - tyingq 5y ago
      That's supposedly just a marketing thing. It doesn't have to be Godaddy. The process is a little convoluted: https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/ft15pk/use_personalized_domain_with_outlook_and_office/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/ft15pk/use_perso...
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - MikusR 5y ago
    And each of those 6 come with 1TB of onedrive and 6 devices of Office apps
chaz6 5y ago
I honestly would not mind a one-off fee to convert my accounts so that I can carry on using my accounts just like any other free @gmail.com user. I never used any of the extra functionality. I only wanted to use my own domain with Google.
- sigzero 5y ago
  Yeah, unfortunately going to @gmail may mean the account name isn't available because it's already in use. Almost all of my family members fall into that category.
chimprich 5y ago
> I'm a Google employee who just found out about this. I'm not annoyed that I have to pay, it's been ~13 years of free service and I don't think Google is obligated to continue providing this to me. Well I'm very annoyed. It's not that I might have to pay for a service, it's the unfairness of it. I've several friends and family members up with accounts on my domain to be nice to them to make life easier for them or because they were too poor/techy to set up something for themselves. I also have a few hacky things set up using free email accounts on my domain, because why not. Now Google want to charge me cash for their accounts after I've done some free marketing for them in getting people using the Google ecosystem. They don't seem to be providing me with any help to get them transferred to a free account. It will cost me either a lot of money or time and/or social capital to solve this. This is an enormous price jump from free. The free Google Apps or whatever it is had up to 100 users. If I had 100 users, that looks like £50 per user per year on their cheapest tier, so £500 [edit: £5,000!! - thanks, @alias_neo] a year.
- alias_neo 5y ago
  I think you mean £5000 per year. I have a dozen or so family members on mine, that's ~£600.
- ryandvm 5y ago
  Agreed. I'm fucking livid. I don't know what their freeloader costs are on the grandfathered Google domain accounts, but I'm having a hard time believing it's going to be worth the amount of goodwill they're going to burn by shitting on their most loyal users of all. These folks have been using Google services (and presumably suggesting as much to others) for at least 10 years. But I'm not paying $100/mo so my extended family can continue to have a vanity Google account. Google ought to think long and hard about this one. The email I draft to everyone to tell them that they're losing access to all their email, docs, pictures, apps, music, etc. is going to be harsh as hell on Google. And I'm sure that I'm not the only one that's going to have to author one of those...
  - chimprich 5y ago
    It's basically the drug dealer business model: get people hooked for free, then start charging them a huge amount when it's too difficult for them to stop. At least your local heroin vendor doesn't pretend it's /always/ going to be free, though...
samueldr 5y ago
Any idea if they'll make a "gmail.com" account migration utility down the line? This is extremely concerning for Play store purchases, and anything non-email attached to the "google apps for your domain" account, like YouTube.
- pxx 5y ago
  Afaict your account will still exist, just not be linked to mail (which I get), but also not linked to calendar (which I don't get). See the email: "You may still retain access to additional Google services, such as YouTube and Google Photos."
  - samueldr 5y ago
    I will wait for an official answer from a Google rep. There is too much at stake to guesstimate on vague phrasing. And still, losing google docs document sharing, and calendar, on the e-mail address identifier which will stay my valid and primary one is a hostile move, plain and simple.
  - deadgiveaway 5y ago
    My email didn't say "You may". May's a stupid word. Do they mean "You are permitted" or "hey, you may have access, you may not - depends how we feel".
- angus-prune 5y ago
  I dug into this with support and the docs. When you cancel workspace, the accounts remain active but lose access to just the workspace features (gmail, drive, docs, calendar etc). The accounts will remain the same for things like google play, youtube etc and you won't lose access to any purchases. The biggest impact I can see, other than the headache of migration, is that former GFYD email address can NEVER be used for docs, drive etc, even on the same terms as a free personal account.
  - samueldr 5y ago
    I will wait for an official answer from a Google rep. There is too much at stake to guesstimate on vague phrasing. And still, losing google docs document sharing, and calendar, on the e-mail address identifier which will stay my valid and primary one is a hostile move, plain and simple.
webmaven 5y ago
> Obviously our use case isn't that common (it's been "legacy" for years) but still annoying to know that there's probably some script I could run to do this, but nobody has built the web UI for it. Sounds like a perfect opportunity for a 20% time project. Surely you aren't the only Googler in this situation?
- y4mi 5y ago
  Its not just googlers, the legacy accounts where available to everyone at the start. but the venn diagram overlap of people * willing to pay for such a tool, * not having switched to another provider since * and not willing to start paying for it now will be tiny
  - quesomaster9000 5y ago
    You're forgetting the circle of ageing techies that used to use AltaVista and now (in)directly control large budgets, have long memories and significant clout when it comes to guiding our replacements into making the right decisions and educating them about corporate (mis)trust.
    - y4mi 5y ago
      Uh, why do they matter in the context of a potential side project to let people migrate their Mails from the discontinued free legacy project to a free private account?
      - quesomaster9000 5y ago
        Because sometimes you have to "do the right thing" and not be an arse, despite what the metrics say.
    - blagie 5y ago
      I'm in that circle. I've cost Google millions of dollars in business due to a history of similar dick moves on their part. This adds just one more to the list. The organization I work at will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever consider using Google for anything business-critical, and neither will businesses I advise in various roles. I have at least a dozen relatives on my Google family domain. We're looking at a lifetime cost of tens of thousands of dollars if I were to switch to Workspace, which is a non-starter. One possibility is to finally incorporate my family foundation as a 501(c)3, if we can do that in time. It's been on my to do list. I'm not even sure where to go from here, but I have things like Android apps I've bought on this account, as does my family. Or I guess the word is "rented." I have a bunch of logins with Google OAuth. Or I guess past tense. I feel like there's a class action in here somewhere.
coffeefirst 5y ago
Right. I think what's lost in translation is because it was free, a lot of early adopters used it in ways that are impractical to transition to paid—extended families, hobby projects, etc, and have been using them for a very long time. I could almost be sympathetic to them not wanting to build a migration tool. But the least they could have done is set up a way to permanently forward to another gmail account so at least old email addresses do not break. They did not do that. Ooh, and one more super fun fact: there is no way to transfer ownership of a Google Drive folder to an account outside of your domain. Which is awesome when you're the owner of a large shared folder that needs to persist.
- rekoil 5y ago
  They are creating a LOT of issues for people if they don't provide a tool to migrate the account to a non G-suite account. I'll be moving email elsewhere, but losing that account and all the services it's connected to will result in a lot of annoyances for me over the years as I discover to what services I've authenticated in this manner. Not to mention Android devices and software purchases tied to the account, what happens to those unless Google provides a migration tool?
  - coffeefirst 5y ago
    Oh man, I didn't even think about Single Sign On. Changing your email on every service you've ever interacted with is a huge project, but if you used SSO, a lot of those can't be changed to conventional emails, and even if you can pick up your domain and hop to Fastmail or something those are going to break.
    - Navarr 5y ago
      I was already livid about this change but this is the piece de resistance. Holy hell. Even after migrating to a regular Google account I've still been using my custom domain as my identity.
mjg59 5y ago
Google employees are entitled to a discounted tier ($0.75 per user per year, I think), and that will continue even if you leave the company.
- mgraczyk 5y ago
  oh lol should have checked first, thanks!
- neop1x 5y ago
  "that will continue even if you leave the company" - yeah, just like the free email on custom domains forever...
  - mjg59 5y ago
    It's not guaranteed, but it's going to last longer than the current free tier, so?
Aloha 5y ago
Look, I'd gladly pay something but 60 dollars per month, every month? I'd be happy to pay 120 dollars a year for the service I'm getting now. Like one of the parallel commenters, I have given out accounts on my domain. I dont really need any more service than I have now, I don't need the full google workspace, I just want gmail on my custom domain, thats all really. The most annoying parts of this, google, the company that hosts my email, couldn't even be bothered to send me an email about this, I instead found out about it on the front page of HN. So now I need to figure out how to migrate out, because if I move my email, I have to move my entire google account, my email, domain hosting/registration, youtube account, everything, I have no way to port the data over even to a regular account.
- adamrmcd 5y ago
  Exactly the same boat here. No email notifying me of the change either. Plus, what about all the third party web sites that offer nice buttons that say "Sign in with Google"? If you used your legacy Gapps domain to authenticate, do you think they all provide easy implementations to migrate your Google-one-click-authentication account to a same-email-new-local-password account? Hell no.
  - rekoil 5y ago
    I haven't looked at it but I would hope that "Sign in with Google" provides the service using it with a stable ID other than the email address. But I can also see services ignoring that and just using the email address anyway... If such a service only saved the email address when the user account was created it might be very difficult for them to fix this unless the do it really quickly and I happen to sign in to their service before all of this goes down.
- rekoil 5y ago
  > I don't need the full google workspace It's honestly just a chore, many things don't work using G-Suite accounts, like taking part of a Google Home family with Gmail users, or signing in to Android Automotive (yes, I had to make a new account to be able to sign in to my Polestar 2 because my account is a G-Suite account), I would be HAPPY if they "downgraded" me to Gmail with custom domains and charged me a few bucks a month for it.

treesknees 5y ago

The problem is, I'm not a freeloader despite having my free account for almost 13 years. I was a proud owner of Nexus phones, Google Fi subscriber, Google Music (YouTube Premium) subscriber, I've purchased apps and tv content on Google Play, and I also started paying for Google Drive storage after they removed the free unlimited photo backups. I had YouTube TV for a time. Having a powerful Gsuite service was a driving factor into the Google ecosystem for me. I've been slowly pulling out of Google's services as they've been shutdown, renamed, etc. This will be the ultimate drive off of their services for me. By wanting an extra $6/month/user, they are now losing out on a lot more. I'm sure that my situation isn't unique.

quesomaster9000 5y ago
The long-tail isn't being considered here IMO. Dyn.com (nee DynDNS, in the dialup days) was bought out by Oracle, my nearly 20 year old lifetime VIP account will be terminated in May despite using a few thousand requests per month and in the past highly recommending their extortionately priced but rather excellent global load balancer and enterprise anycast services (to the tune of thousands of dollars per month). Likewise with Google, I had an original G1 phone and several iterations of the Pixel, have migrated several companies over to their excellent their cloud offerings, again to the tune of tens of thousands per month. It just feels like I'm getting the shitty end of the stick here. In both cases I could've done it cheaper myself with other providers, and had to strongly argue that the alternative (Dyn, Google Cloud, AWS etc.) is a pragmatic and possibly the best albeit expensive choice in the long-run.
- t0mas88 5y ago
  Ah yes, we used Dyn global load balancer 10 years ago. It was a great solution at the time. But they kept their high prices while AWS started offering more flexible solutions at 1/100th of the Dyn price.
- mianos 5y ago
  Identical situations, VIP dyndns, all Nexus phones, 3 Pixels and google apps. On the plus side, I can't think of any other free service I use. (Damn, just remembered I use the hobbyist license for fusion360, they are slowly crippling that but not a big bang). What are you going to do for DNS? I just got static DNS for home so I guess I could host my own DNS but the custom gapps domain mail will be a hassle. Maybe just forward it to my other @gmail account? Luckily I never trusted this to stay free (for all 10 years I think), so I never used the calendar or drive, just the email.
  - collin128 5y ago
    Check out https://improvmx.com/ https://improvmx.com/
    - mianos 5y ago
      Thanks. The free tier looks good. The only issue I have is I use a different alias for every account so I think I'd run out with only 25.
      - tijtij 5y ago
        By default it sets up a wild card local-part so any and all email sent to your domain will be forwarded. So you don't have to predefine aliases for every online account/service that use. What the 25 aliases allotted in the free tier allows you to do is have 25 different domains.
      - cx42net 5y ago
        Hi! I'm ImprovMX's founder. You are correct that you'd reach the limit of 5 free alias in your case. Upgrading to the monthly plan at 9$ would allow you to have up to 100 aliases. Happy to answer any questions that you might need!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

acegopher 5y ago

I was an early "GMail for domains" user, and have felt abandoned as there are services in Google Home I can't use as a "Workspace" account. I would gladly transition to a @gmail.com account and just do an email forward, which is why I had originally signed up, IF ONLY GOOGLE WOULD HAVE A MIGRATION TOOL. They pushed my family into Workspace as they abandoned us, and give us NO OPTION to transfer 13+ years of history.

agentx3r 5y ago
Yes, making me migrate manually means I'm very likely to migrate to Outlook365
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

signal11 5y ago

Is there an equivalent of Microsoft’s Home Use Program (HUP) for Google Workspace? HUP gets you Microsoft 365 (Office apps, OneDrive, ad-free email with a 50GB quota and one custom domain) for your family, with 30% off list price for people using Microsoft solutions at work — which is most office workers, assuming their employers have opted in. It’d be nice to see something similar from Google.

tyingq 5y ago
The 365 Family plan is $99/year, total (not per person), for up to 6 people, and you can use your own domain.
- 422long 5y ago
  Funny.. I was apparently already paying for this and never knew it came with email. Too bad there is a 6 person hard limit as I need 7 accounts. Just tested a bit and it looks like only domains with DNS hosted by Godaddy work with this.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    That's supposedly just a marketing thing. It doesn't have to be Godaddy. The process is a little convoluted: https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/ft15pk/use_personalized_domain_with_outlook_and_office/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/ft15pk/use_perso...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- MikusR 5y ago
  And each of those 6 come with 1TB of onedrive and 6 devices of Office apps

chaz6 5y ago

I honestly would not mind a one-off fee to convert my accounts so that I can carry on using my accounts just like any other free @gmail.com user. I never used any of the extra functionality. I only wanted to use my own domain with Google.

sigzero 5y ago
Yeah, unfortunately going to @gmail may mean the account name isn't available because it's already in use. Almost all of my family members fall into that category.

chimprich 5y ago

> I'm a Google employee who just found out about this. I'm not annoyed that I have to pay, it's been ~13 years of free service and I don't think Google is obligated to continue providing this to me. Well I'm very annoyed. It's not that I might have to pay for a service, it's the unfairness of it. I've several friends and family members up with accounts on my domain to be nice to them to make life easier for them or because they were too poor/techy to set up something for themselves. I also have a few hacky things set up using free email accounts on my domain, because why not. Now Google want to charge me cash for their accounts after I've done some free marketing for them in getting people using the Google ecosystem. They don't seem to be providing me with any help to get them transferred to a free account. It will cost me either a lot of money or time and/or social capital to solve this. This is an enormous price jump from free. The free Google Apps or whatever it is had up to 100 users. If I had 100 users, that looks like £50 per user per year on their cheapest tier, so £500 [edit: £5,000!! - thanks, @alias_neo] a year.

alias_neo 5y ago
I think you mean £5000 per year. I have a dozen or so family members on mine, that's ~£600.
ryandvm 5y ago
Agreed. I'm fucking livid. I don't know what their freeloader costs are on the grandfathered Google domain accounts, but I'm having a hard time believing it's going to be worth the amount of goodwill they're going to burn by shitting on their most loyal users of all. These folks have been using Google services (and presumably suggesting as much to others) for at least 10 years. But I'm not paying $100/mo so my extended family can continue to have a vanity Google account. Google ought to think long and hard about this one. The email I draft to everyone to tell them that they're losing access to all their email, docs, pictures, apps, music, etc. is going to be harsh as hell on Google. And I'm sure that I'm not the only one that's going to have to author one of those...
- chimprich 5y ago
  It's basically the drug dealer business model: get people hooked for free, then start charging them a huge amount when it's too difficult for them to stop. At least your local heroin vendor doesn't pretend it's /always/ going to be free, though...

samueldr 5y ago

Any idea if they'll make a "gmail.com" account migration utility down the line? This is extremely concerning for Play store purchases, and anything non-email attached to the "google apps for your domain" account, like YouTube.

pxx 5y ago
Afaict your account will still exist, just not be linked to mail (which I get), but also not linked to calendar (which I don't get). See the email: "You may still retain access to additional Google services, such as YouTube and Google Photos."
- samueldr 5y ago
  I will wait for an official answer from a Google rep. There is too much at stake to guesstimate on vague phrasing. And still, losing google docs document sharing, and calendar, on the e-mail address identifier which will stay my valid and primary one is a hostile move, plain and simple.
- deadgiveaway 5y ago
  My email didn't say "You may". May's a stupid word. Do they mean "You are permitted" or "hey, you may have access, you may not - depends how we feel".
angus-prune 5y ago
I dug into this with support and the docs. When you cancel workspace, the accounts remain active but lose access to just the workspace features (gmail, drive, docs, calendar etc). The accounts will remain the same for things like google play, youtube etc and you won't lose access to any purchases. The biggest impact I can see, other than the headache of migration, is that former GFYD email address can NEVER be used for docs, drive etc, even on the same terms as a free personal account.
- samueldr 5y ago
  I will wait for an official answer from a Google rep. There is too much at stake to guesstimate on vague phrasing. And still, losing google docs document sharing, and calendar, on the e-mail address identifier which will stay my valid and primary one is a hostile move, plain and simple.

webmaven 5y ago

> Obviously our use case isn't that common (it's been "legacy" for years) but still annoying to know that there's probably some script I could run to do this, but nobody has built the web UI for it. Sounds like a perfect opportunity for a 20% time project. Surely you aren't the only Googler in this situation?

y4mi 5y ago
Its not just googlers, the legacy accounts where available to everyone at the start. but the venn diagram overlap of people * willing to pay for such a tool, * not having switched to another provider since * and not willing to start paying for it now will be tiny
- quesomaster9000 5y ago
  You're forgetting the circle of ageing techies that used to use AltaVista and now (in)directly control large budgets, have long memories and significant clout when it comes to guiding our replacements into making the right decisions and educating them about corporate (mis)trust.
  - y4mi 5y ago
    Uh, why do they matter in the context of a potential side project to let people migrate their Mails from the discontinued free legacy project to a free private account?
    - quesomaster9000 5y ago
      Because sometimes you have to "do the right thing" and not be an arse, despite what the metrics say.
  - blagie 5y ago
    I'm in that circle. I've cost Google millions of dollars in business due to a history of similar dick moves on their part. This adds just one more to the list. The organization I work at will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever consider using Google for anything business-critical, and neither will businesses I advise in various roles. I have at least a dozen relatives on my Google family domain. We're looking at a lifetime cost of tens of thousands of dollars if I were to switch to Workspace, which is a non-starter. One possibility is to finally incorporate my family foundation as a 501(c)3, if we can do that in time. It's been on my to do list. I'm not even sure where to go from here, but I have things like Android apps I've bought on this account, as does my family. Or I guess the word is "rented." I have a bunch of logins with Google OAuth. Or I guess past tense. I feel like there's a class action in here somewhere.

coffeefirst 5y ago

Right. I think what's lost in translation is because it was free, a lot of early adopters used it in ways that are impractical to transition to paid—extended families, hobby projects, etc, and have been using them for a very long time. I could almost be sympathetic to them not wanting to build a migration tool. But the least they could have done is set up a way to permanently forward to another gmail account so at least old email addresses do not break. They did not do that. Ooh, and one more super fun fact: there is no way to transfer ownership of a Google Drive folder to an account outside of your domain. Which is awesome when you're the owner of a large shared folder that needs to persist.

rekoil 5y ago
They are creating a LOT of issues for people if they don't provide a tool to migrate the account to a non G-suite account. I'll be moving email elsewhere, but losing that account and all the services it's connected to will result in a lot of annoyances for me over the years as I discover to what services I've authenticated in this manner. Not to mention Android devices and software purchases tied to the account, what happens to those unless Google provides a migration tool?
- coffeefirst 5y ago
  Oh man, I didn't even think about Single Sign On. Changing your email on every service you've ever interacted with is a huge project, but if you used SSO, a lot of those can't be changed to conventional emails, and even if you can pick up your domain and hop to Fastmail or something those are going to break.
  - Navarr 5y ago
    I was already livid about this change but this is the piece de resistance. Holy hell. Even after migrating to a regular Google account I've still been using my custom domain as my identity.

mjg59 5y ago

Google employees are entitled to a discounted tier ($0.75 per user per year, I think), and that will continue even if you leave the company.

mgraczyk 5y ago
oh lol should have checked first, thanks!
neop1x 5y ago
"that will continue even if you leave the company" - yeah, just like the free email on custom domains forever...
- mjg59 5y ago
  It's not guaranteed, but it's going to last longer than the current free tier, so?

Aloha 5y ago

Look, I'd gladly pay something but 60 dollars per month, every month? I'd be happy to pay 120 dollars a year for the service I'm getting now. Like one of the parallel commenters, I have given out accounts on my domain. I dont really need any more service than I have now, I don't need the full google workspace, I just want gmail on my custom domain, thats all really. The most annoying parts of this, google, the company that hosts my email, couldn't even be bothered to send me an email about this, I instead found out about it on the front page of HN. So now I need to figure out how to migrate out, because if I move my email, I have to move my entire google account, my email, domain hosting/registration, youtube account, everything, I have no way to port the data over even to a regular account.

adamrmcd 5y ago
Exactly the same boat here. No email notifying me of the change either. Plus, what about all the third party web sites that offer nice buttons that say "Sign in with Google"? If you used your legacy Gapps domain to authenticate, do you think they all provide easy implementations to migrate your Google-one-click-authentication account to a same-email-new-local-password account? Hell no.
- rekoil 5y ago
  I haven't looked at it but I would hope that "Sign in with Google" provides the service using it with a stable ID other than the email address. But I can also see services ignoring that and just using the email address anyway... If such a service only saved the email address when the user account was created it might be very difficult for them to fix this unless the do it really quickly and I happen to sign in to their service before all of this goes down.
rekoil 5y ago
> I don't need the full google workspace It's honestly just a chore, many things don't work using G-Suite accounts, like taking part of a Google Home family with Gmail users, or signing in to Android Automotive (yes, I had to make a new account to be able to sign in to my Polestar 2 because my account is a G-Suite account), I would be HAPPY if they "downgraded" me to Gmail with custom domains and charged me a few bucks a month for it.