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They aren't killing Workspace, they're just making users upgrade to a paid plan. It's the same product.
by evan_ 5y ago
They aren't killing Workspace, they're just making users upgrade to a paid plan. It's the same product.
- oaiey 5y agoNot exactly. The plans are different with different product mix. At least I remember it like that.
- kevincox 5y agoThey could have just removed the difference if it was costing them so much. Very few features were different from the lowest workspace plan as far as I remember.
- WorldMaker 5y agoSo far as I could tell the remaining "difference" was price, and they probably thought it easier to raise the price on the grandfathered accounts than lower the price of the lowest tier. (Obviously, it's never easy to raise prices.)
- kevincox 5y agoIf the only remaining difference was price I don't think it would cost much at all to maintain. IIRC a couple of things were limited. I ran into a few. - Reduced Google Voice/Meet Calling options. - No TLS rules for mail.
- WorldMaker 5y ago> If the only remaining difference was price I don't think it would cost much at all to maintain. You are thinking about marginal costs. Even if there is no marginal cost for a "free" priced tier, that doesn't mean the operating costs of the tier go away and that the tier isn't likely losing money. We don't have transparent data on how much in terms of operating costs Google was eating for these grandfathered in free accounts, but it doesn't take a lot to imagine there were some operating costs that Google was possibly eating for some time now. I would imagine they ran they ran some sort of analysis on the pros/cons of goodwill/marketing versus operating costs and a price raise made sense.
- jrochkind1 5y agoNot only that, they actually killed free workspace years ago, they just grandfathered in legacy users. That's what they're ending. I am not sure if google will end up terminating free personal gmail eventually or not. But I don't take terminating the free workspaces some years ago, or terminating the grandfathered-in legacy leftover free workspaces more recently--as any kind of a signal for it.
- lamontcg 5y agoGmail is all "you are the product" free though. They're getting all that data from your e-mail and can chew it up and sell it back to other businesses (apparently they don't use it to target ads at you any more, but you can be certain they're still harvesting data). I'm fairly sure collecting all that data is core to their business model and they'd never make it paid.
- qwertox 5y agoSame product but with reduced functionality. For example, email routing isn't available (with the exception of the catch-all functionality).