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> 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 obli

> 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...
- weeblewobble 5y ago
  I've been reading people on HN talk about how Google is burning their goodwill and there will be Very Serious Consequences for a literal decade. Over that time Google stock price has gone up 10x.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    Google's stock price is so driven by its advertising business that it is absolutely disconnected from Google burning its goodwill in "prosumer" services like this and some of the others cycled through on HN. Given how large Google's advertising division's reach is outside of Google products, its probable that even a large boycott of Google's first party consumer services wouldn't easily affect the advertising business bottom line. At least for now. At some point they could burn enough goodwill that even advertisers and sites that need advertising won't work with them. (Given what we know from DoubleClick's legacy even before they merged into Google though, the internet in general doesn't seem to mind evil companies running their ads so long as they get paid their share of ad revenue.)
    - weeblewobble 5y ago
      Maybe, but you'd think if you spent 10 years steadily burning goodwill you'd eventually run out of it
  - tyingq 5y ago
    >Over that time Google stock price has gone up 10x. Based mostly on taking display ads from "only in the sidebar" to "everywhere, including every pixel above the fold if the search term is lucrative". There's not a lot of juice left there to continue revenue increases that exceed general internet eyeball growth. They will still make an insane amount of money, but I don't see how they can sustain past growth YoY percentages.
ymolodtsov 5y ago
This has been a legacy feature for quite some time. Honestly, if it was just about email I think there would be nothing wrong with it. The main problem is that it's THE Google account for some people, which includes all their purchases and data and there's no way to move it. Using G-Suite as your personal email has always been hell anyway.
- Masema 5y ago
  > it's THE Google account for some people, which includes all their purchases and data and there's no way to move it. In these comments (on HN), I've seen claims that we'll still be able to login to Google with our old accounts, like how it's possible to have a Google account with an @yahoo login. I've also seen people disputing that, though. > Using G-Suite as your personal email has always been hell anyway. I've not had "hell"-level problems. It's all been working pretty well for me.
  - zevlag 5y ago
    It started out really simple, and good. Then as google added other features, new products, acquired companies, it's gotten harder and harder.

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...
weeblewobble 5y ago
I've been reading people on HN talk about how Google is burning their goodwill and there will be Very Serious Consequences for a literal decade. Over that time Google stock price has gone up 10x.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  Google's stock price is so driven by its advertising business that it is absolutely disconnected from Google burning its goodwill in "prosumer" services like this and some of the others cycled through on HN. Given how large Google's advertising division's reach is outside of Google products, its probable that even a large boycott of Google's first party consumer services wouldn't easily affect the advertising business bottom line. At least for now. At some point they could burn enough goodwill that even advertisers and sites that need advertising won't work with them. (Given what we know from DoubleClick's legacy even before they merged into Google though, the internet in general doesn't seem to mind evil companies running their ads so long as they get paid their share of ad revenue.)
  - weeblewobble 5y ago
    Maybe, but you'd think if you spent 10 years steadily burning goodwill you'd eventually run out of it
- tyingq 5y ago
  >Over that time Google stock price has gone up 10x. Based mostly on taking display ads from "only in the sidebar" to "everywhere, including every pixel above the fold if the search term is lucrative". There's not a lot of juice left there to continue revenue increases that exceed general internet eyeball growth. They will still make an insane amount of money, but I don't see how they can sustain past growth YoY percentages.

ymolodtsov 5y ago

This has been a legacy feature for quite some time. Honestly, if it was just about email I think there would be nothing wrong with it. The main problem is that it's THE Google account for some people, which includes all their purchases and data and there's no way to move it. Using G-Suite as your personal email has always been hell anyway.

Masema 5y ago
> it's THE Google account for some people, which includes all their purchases and data and there's no way to move it. In these comments (on HN), I've seen claims that we'll still be able to login to Google with our old accounts, like how it's possible to have a Google account with an @yahoo login. I've also seen people disputing that, though. > Using G-Suite as your personal email has always been hell anyway. I've not had "hell"-level problems. It's all been working pretty well for me.
- zevlag 5y ago
  It started out really simple, and good. Then as google added other features, new products, acquired companies, it's gotten harder and harder.