12 ms·

I agree with you that Google's Apps pricing is steep, but I don't think they're marketing it towards the average guy who just wants a couple of email accounts f

by ceol 15y ago

I agree with you that Google's Apps pricing is steep, but I don't think they're marketing it towards the average guy who just wants a couple of email accounts for his personal site. I think they're marketing it towards businesses and schools who see $50/acct/yr as pennies compared to hosting their own email server, hiring a sysadmin (or telling their current admin to handle it), and then supporting that server all day, every day. I'm not a small business owner, though, so I don't know how much one would generally pay for email, or how much $50/person/yr is compared to the rest of the business.

pbz 15y ago
Exactly, you're either small and use the free version or you're very big and $50/a/y is no big deal. There's nothing in-between. I know quite a few companies who would gladly pay something, even if the free version works for them.
- ceol 15y ago
  I'd like the option to maybe pay $50/yr for 20 or 30 accounts. I have a couple of sites that need more than 10 accounts but can't justify paying $50 per. But who knows? Maybe Google saw that most businesses use 15 or 20 email accounts, so if they offered something like that, they'd lose a lot of money.
JonWood 15y ago
$50/acct/year comes to $4.16/acct/month. If your staff's use of email isn't in someway contributing to making more then $4.16/month you should probably just fire them, or not give them an email address in the first place.
- onemoreact 15y ago
  50 users @ 4.16$ / month = 208$ / month subtracting 50$ / month in HW and bandwidth you left your admins with about 3 hours of work @50$ an hour including overhead. Sorry, most admins spend more than 3 hours a month dealing with internal email at small companies. (Troubleshooting, offsite backups, SPAM, logs etc.)
  - saurik 15y ago
    JonWood is claiming that "yes, even small companies would want this" by making an economic argument about the value of e-mail per employee; his claim is that $4.16/month/employee, even with a handful of employees, is not that much. Meanwhile, you seem to be making a snippy ("sorry") counter-argument that his calculations are failing to take into account that if he had that much money to spend, he would be underestimating the cost of his system administrators, which would cost more than that. I am sorry, but I don't understand... you both seem to be agreeing with and arguing with his point, by claiming that something unrelated (the units don't even seem the same to me: money made per employee vs. money spent per administrator) was not taken into account.
- pbz 15y ago
  I'm talking about places where maybe 10 people really need email and 100 other maybe once a week if that. You can definitely justify the cost for those 10 people, but not for the other 100. If you could mix and match free and non-free accounts this would work great, but you can't. Again, I'm talking about companies with razor thin margins where the technology side is not super important. What do they do now? They mainly use free gmail/live/yahoo accounts.
  - JonWood 15y ago
    You can in fact mix and match - you can use Google Apps on top of a corporate system such as Exchange for only specific users. It's unlikely to save you any money since you'll then need someone to run it, but it's possible. As things stand at the moment the company I'm working for is in exactly that boat of some staff depending on email, and others only needing to retrieve a single email on each day they're working. We're working around it right now by just getting them to give us their personal email address. That probably won't scale long term, but for now it does the job, and if we get to the point of needing more then I may just throw together a quick and dirty mail server for the people who don't need the convenience of Google Apps syncing between devices for them.

by ceol 15y ago

pbz 15y ago

Exactly, you're either small and use the free version or you're very big and $50/a/y is no big deal. There's nothing in-between. I know quite a few companies who would gladly pay something, even if the free version works for them.

ceol 15y ago
I'd like the option to maybe pay $50/yr for 20 or 30 accounts. I have a couple of sites that need more than 10 accounts but can't justify paying $50 per. But who knows? Maybe Google saw that most businesses use 15 or 20 email accounts, so if they offered something like that, they'd lose a lot of money.

JonWood 15y ago

$50/acct/year comes to $4.16/acct/month. If your staff's use of email isn't in someway contributing to making more then $4.16/month you should probably just fire them, or not give them an email address in the first place.

onemoreact 15y ago
50 users @ 4.16$ / month = 208$ / month subtracting 50$ / month in HW and bandwidth you left your admins with about 3 hours of work @50$ an hour including overhead. Sorry, most admins spend more than 3 hours a month dealing with internal email at small companies. (Troubleshooting, offsite backups, SPAM, logs etc.)
- saurik 15y ago
  JonWood is claiming that "yes, even small companies would want this" by making an economic argument about the value of e-mail per employee; his claim is that $4.16/month/employee, even with a handful of employees, is not that much. Meanwhile, you seem to be making a snippy ("sorry") counter-argument that his calculations are failing to take into account that if he had that much money to spend, he would be underestimating the cost of his system administrators, which would cost more than that. I am sorry, but I don't understand... you both seem to be agreeing with and arguing with his point, by claiming that something unrelated (the units don't even seem the same to me: money made per employee vs. money spent per administrator) was not taken into account.
pbz 15y ago
I'm talking about places where maybe 10 people really need email and 100 other maybe once a week if that. You can definitely justify the cost for those 10 people, but not for the other 100. If you could mix and match free and non-free accounts this would work great, but you can't. Again, I'm talking about companies with razor thin margins where the technology side is not super important. What do they do now? They mainly use free gmail/live/yahoo accounts.
- JonWood 15y ago
  You can in fact mix and match - you can use Google Apps on top of a corporate system such as Exchange for only specific users. It's unlikely to save you any money since you'll then need someone to run it, but it's possible. As things stand at the moment the company I'm working for is in exactly that boat of some staff depending on email, and others only needing to retrieve a single email on each day they're working. We're working around it right now by just getting them to give us their personal email address. That probably won't scale long term, but for now it does the job, and if we get to the point of needing more then I may just throw together a quick and dirty mail server for the people who don't need the convenience of Google Apps syncing between devices for them.