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You're complaining that a service you use all the time for a decade for free now might cost the equivalent of a cup of coffee per month? I'm all about Google b

• rodolphoarruda 5y ago
  You see how things change in perspective depending where you are in the world. Google cost would be nowhere near a coffee per month. If I consider my family, the 4 of us, the cost would be equivalent to going 1 extra week per month to the supermarket. Per year terms? It would be like saving the money to spend a weekend at the beach at a nice hotel once a year. I want that money for me! Edit: I'm in Brazil BTW.
• bmarquez 5y ago
  > The loss of Youtube purchases; android play purchases, etc. is going to hurt It's basically blackmail: pay the new monthly fee which you didn't agree to when you signed up, or lose access to everything you've already paid for.
  • enobrev 5y ago
    "paid for"?
    • bmarquez 5y ago
      The paid Android apps, YouTube purchases, etc which the parent commenter bought using his account. If it was just email hosting (the GSuite service itself), it wouldn't be such a big deal.
      • enobrev 5y ago
        I misunderstood. Thank you for the clarification.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • cududa 5y ago
    I mean, I’m annoyed sure but I’ve gotten over a decade of free service. When I saw the announcement for a half second considered setting up an email server again then remembered what a massive pain in the ass that use to be and just going to pay the fee
    • Aloha 5y ago
      I'm getting precisely one value added service over a regular google account - a custom domain. I dont need any of the other workspace related frippery, I don't want it, it makes some of the features of the account harder to use - it was better before it had the notion of an organization even. I just want to be able to create some gmail accounts under my domain, I'm not a business, I'm a guy who handed out email accounts to his friends, now I gotta figure out if any of them are using them still.
      • sandos 5y ago
        Same here, its the domain I care about. Its my fiancees last name in our countries TLD. Here name is really short and nice, so it has been awesome. This is a bummer, since her sister and fiancee are also using it. Thank god I have not been using it for more than an email alias, and the kids too.
      • Navarr 5y ago
        Same thing here. Within the past two years I started a transition to a regular Google Account b/c GApps Free was a second class citizen (no family groups, etc.) Killing the free tier now is a huge PITA, and especially aggravating without them implementing any way to carry over licenses to a regular google account which is still free.
  • rnk 5y ago
    That's one reason why I have tried to only buy things on my personal Gmail account (@gmail.com), a few times I forgot and bought things on my private domain.
  • progforlyfe 5y ago
    This is very troublesome... It is possible to create a general, personal Google account using any email address (iirc) so I wonder if it is possible to just migrate to your own email solution (since you own the domain) and keep the google account, or at least migrate it to a regular account.
    • karlshea 5y ago
      It appears this is not possible. I don’t need any of the G Suite features, and I don’t even need email. I just need my single user inside G Suite to be converted to a normal unmanaged Google account but there doesn’t seem to be a way to do that.
      • deadgiveaway 5y ago
        Some people are saying if you convert your account to Google workspace then cancel that then you end up with what you want. You'd keep Photos and YouTube but no Gmail, contacts, calendar etc. I'm trying to discover if this is true.
        • karlshea 5y ago
          I would still need Docs, which is “core”.
          • deadgiveaway 5y ago
            I don't really understand. Why, when leaving G suite and going back to a normal account, would you not have access to stuff like Docs, Gmail etc? It's like you're being punished, rather than simply not having extra features.
            • karlshea 5y ago
              FYI this doesn't actually seem to be the case... quoting from my other comment in a different thread: Over the last week I've gone through all of the steps of registering a new domain, setting it up with Google Workspace, sharing some docs back and forth, deleting the entire organization, and then signing up for a new google account using the same email address (so no gmail). After each step I waited 24 hours. I was able to access Docs and share back and forth using this reused address on the new account. You'll obviously lose all of the existing share connections, but it's not like the address itself is burned.
• signal11 5y ago
  > You're complaining that a service you use all the time for a decade for free now might cost the equivalent of a cup of coffee per month? It’s easy to paint customers as frightful moaners, but that’s a surefire way to lose customers, or at least alienate them. Google’s Reader debacle comes to mind. In particular, the short notice period (3 months + 2 months grace) for something people have been using for a decade is jarring. And these were the earliest customers of Google Apps for your Domain, and created a lot of positive word of mouth publicity for Google. Ultimately, it’s not about right and wrong, it’s about how you make customers feel, and Google institutionally doesn’t know how to make ordinary customers feel great when things go wrong. It’s an institutional issue. (Exception: if you’ve got enterprise support for GCP. Then you get a lot of engagement.) By the same token, people have been using free Gmail accounts for a while now. What do you think the perception will be if Google asked them to pony up $60 a year with 5 months’ notice?
  • Kalium 5y ago
    > In particular, the short notice period (3 months + 2 months grace) for something people have been using for a decade is jarring. For me, this raises the obvious question. How long a notice period is long enough? Six months? Eight? A year? Five years? A decade? I think we can all agree that a decade would be an excessive and unreasonable expectation. > By the same token, people have been using free Gmail accounts for a while now. What do you think the perception will be if Google asked them to pony up $60 a year with 5 months’ notice? Probably about the same as if Google asked them to pony up $60 a year with a year's notice. Which is to say incredibly hostile because people have come to view free Gmail accounts as a basic public service for which no payment will ever be required under any circumstances.
    • 300bps 5y ago
      How long a notice period is long enough? Looking at it another way, Google's most recent net profit is $18.94 billion per quarter. I have no idea but if there are 1 million G Suite Legacy accounts out there at $60 per year. That would increase their revenue $60 million per year. So just assume all that revenue is net profit which would make their quarterly net profit go from $18.94 billion to $18.955 billion for the low cost of pissing off 1 million people.
• theossuary 5y ago
  I host 7 emails right now, it'd cost $500/year for email moving forward. I'd be happy to convert accounts to personal Gmail accounts and do mail forwarding. I'd be happy to move to a family plan for $100/year. After being a user for a decade, you'd think Google would provide me a reasonable way to pay them for their services. But I can't swing $500/year for email.
  • fckthisguy 5y ago
    Migrating to another email provider might be a pain when it comes to importing older mailbox content, but any of the alternative email providers would be way cheaper in the long run. I use Protonmail for myself and around 5 others, with close to 10 mailboxes. I highly recommend it. Not sure what's available from them re. importing older mailboxes - I've never done it - but everything I've used jas been fantastic. Protonmail's cheap too. Less than $50 annually for all that I use, including multi-user VPN. I've heard good things about Fastmail too, of you're looking for an alternative.
    • spronkey 5y ago
      Do you know what plan you are on for Protonmail? I can't see anything that would allow that many mailboxes for anything less than 288 EUR a year?
      • theshrike79 5y ago
        Fastmail works pretty well and it's priced from $37.20/year/user. Still a bit pricey if you're not a heavy user and the mailbox is just for random website contacts.
      • nacs 5y ago
        I started migrating to Migadu last night after seeing this post. I have 5 domains and a few users and it should cost me $20 a year once their trial expires.
    • Beached 5y ago
      Microsoft has a Gmail migration tool. not sure if MS is cheaper, but it is stupid easy and fast to migrate from Gmail/gsuite to o365. just plug in credentials and hit run. I've moved small businesses on gsuite free, multiple personal gmails over using their tool, and I have not had an issue in the dozen or so corps I moved
• KennyBlanken 5y ago
  The email service that Google provides for free solely to data-mine / profile you and be assured they always know your IP addresses/browsers so they can better track you, and so on?
  • prirun 5y ago
    And they will be doing the same thing when getting paid.
• JaimeThompson 5y ago
  It would be nice if the system worked but it isn't currently for me. It says I have to have 2 factor enable which I have had enabled for a long time.
• GeekyBear 5y ago
  > You're complaining that a service you use all the time for a decade for free now might cost the equivalent of a cup of coffee per month? People always complain about bait and switch tactics. Give them a way to revert to a free personal account without losing access to their files, data, and any digital goods they may have purchased and let them decide if they want to covert to a paid account or not.
  • rajup 5y ago
    You can always use Google Takeout so you don't lose access to your files.
    • fencepost 5y ago
      You can always use Google Takeout so you don't lose access to your files. Does Google Takeout allow you to download de-DRMed media you've paid for through Google properties? Provide functional APKs of paid Android apps that will continue working without an active and functional Google account?
    • Aloha 5y ago
      How do I migrate my domains purchased under my google workspace account?
      • brewdad 5y ago
        Those should be pretty easy, provided you do it now. Domain transfers are straightforward with any provider. I moved mine to Namecheap a few years ago.
    • Beached 5y ago
      unfortunately, that isn't reliable. hwwn the ended google play, I lost TBs of music because Google takeout didn't work, and there isn't a sole at Google I can contact to get support for it.
    • GeekyBear 5y ago
      That's not a substitute for not allowing people to choose between a free account and a paid account.
• richardw 5y ago
  The account that locked them into Google for a decade? Yes. No competitor could begin to attempt to sell a new service against free. Now the social contract is switching after all the baiting and it’s money time. It’s typical in SaaS to grandfather in old accounts. You take the hit because your later client base is so much bigger, and why not keep your early adopters sweet. Google has calculated the value of those early adopters and decided it’s worth it. Wait until customers have too much to lose and then yank the fishing line. “You call them early adopters? We call them freeloaders.” This is why I use an iPhone. I pay the money and I get to keep (mostly) my data. Google, you give away your data and pay nothing. Now you give data and you pay? Ick. If Apple starts giving away my data I’d be equally pissed.
• seanhunter 5y ago
  Takeout is a terriffic service, but not a great way of doing this. It will actually create additional work. When you set up the new microsoft account you can simply migrate all calendars, contacts and mail as part of the setup. [1] A lot of people are talking about entitlement and saying how people shouldn't complain when free stuff goes away. I think those people are missing the point. Google is an incredibly profitable company and it would cost them almost nothing to continue to offer this service. By choosing not to, they piss people off (rightly or wrongly) and won't make much of anything in return. We can speculate about how they got to a place where maintaining this service was painful enough to justify doing that, but from the outside it seems like a poor decision that is hostile to users and antithetical to how they used to do things. That plays into the narrative that this ain't your mamma's google any more and something cool about the 2000s spirit has passed away. [1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/import-gmail-to-outlook-20fdb8f2-fed8-4b14-baf0-bf04b9c44bf7 https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/import-gmail-to-o...
• scotty79 5y ago
  Yes. Because non-free is infinitely more than free. Imagine nothing changes, but now your wife demands you pay her cost of cup of coffee every time you have sex. Does that eff you up a little bit or do you barely notice?
  • lanterk 5y ago
    Um, depending on where you live, wouldn't that create some legal headache?
• packetlost 5y ago
  It's a minimum of $6/m per inbox so if you have just 10 emails it's $720/year. That's not a small chunk of change if you're just using the email feature.
• jacquesm 5y ago
  No. People are pissed off because this is a clear example of bait and switch. Google advertised this as Free forever. Forever isn't a decade. If they had instead marketed it as 'free for a decade and then you'll pay some arbitrary amount' what do you think the adoption would have been?
• pandemicsoul 5y ago
  I'm in a different boat than OP so maybe I can also provide a different perspective. I have a half-dozen legacy free G Suite accounts that I set up way back in the day. One was sort of a "junk email" domain that I used for logins on sites I registered for to try out and whatnot. Another was for my main personal domain. Another was for a family domain. A couple others were projects that then got retired. Now I'm down to two personal Google Workspace accounts and I probably will pay for one of them, while closing the other. But the biggest issue for me right now is the club I run, which has nearly 30 accounts on our Google Workspace domain. The only reason I did this, way back when, was because of the promise of "free forever." While we have about 30 people on Google Workspace, we have another 70 or so "non-staff" members. Our entire group of about 100 fundraises for our website costs every year, which are considerable for an all-volunteer group ($2000-ish) because we have a pretty resource intensive MediaWiki installation, and other resources. We've spent 10 years integrating with Google. All of our other resources use Google login. Our group has dozens of Google Groups used for sub-committees. We use Google Drive/Docs excessively. And so on. But there's no way we can afford to DOUBLE our costs just for Google Workspace. And we can't get a non-profit discount because we're not a charitable organization – we're just a club of writers. So for us, this is a huge nuisance because not only is Google breaking the agreement it made with us ("FREE FOREVER"), but I don't have the time or resources to manage this kind of transition to something else. And... what, even? If we had known from the beginning they'd break their promise of being free forever, I just wouldn't have built so much infrastructure on top of this system.
• pacerdawn 5y ago
  Think about it this way: Google: "Come enjoy this limited version of our service, it's absolutely free!" Consumer: "Excellent. I was going to go with this other service, but since this one is free I will take advantage of it!" Years later... Google: "Ok, now that you have many years of data in our system, it's time for you to start paying!" Consumer: "Wait... what?" Yes, it's been free. But Google offered it for free and now people have years of data in it. Data which could have been in another service had Google not offered this one for free to begin with. It's kind of like a bait and switch. Get people in, get them to sink most of their life into it, and then start charging. Also, it's not like a lot of people were out looking for this kind of solution. The fact that it was free brought in a LOT of people who otherwise wouldn't have done it, and are now tied down to it. That's why a lot of people are mad, and to me it is justifiable.