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Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups
- gm_ 14y agoAt least with customers being made to sign up to premium accounts with 24/7 support available there will be less horror stories of customers being locked out of their Google Apps accounts.
- cnaut 14y agoOffice 365 is much cheaper now - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/compare-plans.aspx?WT.z_O365_ca=Buy_online-software_en-us http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/compare-plans.aspx?...
- revelation 14y agoNot sure how to feel about this. The core feature of the free Google Apps was that you could use GMail with your own domain without having to run a dedicated mail server yourself.
- pyre 14y agoMaybe this will drive alternatives that are cheaper than $50 per user per year.
- ericleeclark 14y agoAny cheaper than $50 per user per year and you're in the free range. Just to keep this in perspective, $50 a year is a pretty good value when you think about what you're getting in Google Apps.
- justincormack 14y agoAnd? You want this to be free? It clearly costs money.
- burke 14y agoHow so? It's essentially the same service as gmail, only with a different domain. The incremental cost to them is zero, and they make the same revenue as they do from a gmail user.
- ams6110 14y agoGoogle's cost != Value to You.
- justincormack 14y agoA gmail user advertises gmail every time they send a mail. Your own domain does not. Its a mass market product. Having your own domain is not.
- nuclear_eclipse 14y agoI see ads on my free google apps account...
- pyre 14y agoExpect them to start including "Upgrade now to a paid Google Apps account!" ;-)
- natrius 14y agoPlenty of services will let you forward your mail to a normal GMail account. Without an SMTP server, your GMail account will still be visible to your recipients, but it's not so bad.
- indiecore 14y agoYes I'm sure people will appreciate getting email back from <stupid_username_because_they_were_all_taken_234234>@gmail.com
- natrius 14y agoYou can send as any email address you have access to. Some email clients show the GMail address as well when the email is sent through GMail's SMTP servers. It's suboptimal, but there are plenty of SMTP services you could use if you want to get around that.
- jlmendezbonini 14y agoYou can also configure it so that Gmail uses the other email address SMTP servers. However, I'm not quite sure whether they still include the originating Gmail address in the email headers.
- natrius 14y agoIf it uses the other addresses's SMTP server, it displays like a normal email would.
- digikata 14y agoI setup my email that way years ago and abandoned it. At that time, it caused a lot of my outgoing emails to get flagged as spam because of the mismatch of various mail headers between the Gmail domains with the various to/from/reply-to domains. Don't know if it would trip fewer spam filters now.
- toomuchtodo 14y ago
- pippy 14y agoThis could be a good thing. If you approach your manager wanting to switch from dedicated to cloud email service, and you tell him it's for free, he's going to be suspicious. If there's a cost involved - no matter how small - it gives the product a degree liability for support.
- bruceboughton 14y agoYou could always pay for Google Apps if you wanted to, as I suspect most >5 person business do.
- modeless 14y agoYou can still use GMail with any domain: http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=21289&from=21288&rd=1 http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe... This method is actually far more convenient than setting up Google Apps. You can both send and receive mail at the other domain, and you get a unified inbox (which Google Apps never provided).
- agwa 14y agoNo, that method requires that the other domain have its own mail server to accept and store the mail until gmail comes and fetches it with POP. Who will host that other server? Google Apps for domains lets you point your domain's MX record directly at Google, and Google accepts the mail for you.
- modeless 14y agoThe important part of Google Apps is the GMail interface, not the SMTP service. SMTP hosting is easy to come by; most hosting services include it with their web hosting packages.
- antihero 14y agoYet this doesn't appear to be any sort of mail-hosting thing, so you'd still have to sort out mail with an entirely different provider to receive e-mails on your domain. This is pretty awful.
- modeless 14y agoYou're going to need a hosting provider to host your website anyway; mail service is probably included. How is that awful?
- pbreit 14y agoWrong, wrong and wrong.
- bschlinker 14y ago
- chrisblackwell 14y agoThis is really a logical step. If you are an individual and don't really see the value in $50 a year, you can forward your own domain to your regular Gmail account and set the reply to email address to whatever you want. If you run a business and need the Google Apps platform, then $50 a year really shouldn't be a barrier for you. If it is, time to rethink your business priorities.
- aidos 14y ago$50 / user / year - still not insane but I know it's put people off in the past.
- toomuchtodo 14y agoWe have a Google Apps account at my day gig with 79 users; I pay it monthly on a credit card, at $5/month, so right around $400/month. That is incredible value for what we get with Google Apps, as they don't just do our email, calendar, etc, but also Drive and our authentication (via OAuth/LDAP).
- Margh 14y agoCertainly puts me off. $5/10 per user per year, wouldn't think twice about it (even though the money would be paid grudgingly). With the number of users we have that would end up being around $50/year; but $500/year to host some email and store spreadsheets? No thanks.
- chrisblackwell 14y agoLet's imagine your company has 100 employees in it. So at $5/user a month, you are paying $500 a month. Now, the median salary for thos 100 employees is most likely at least $3000, so you are paying them collectively $300,000 a month. That represents 0.016% of their salary. Do you get where I'm going with this?
- Margh 14y agoAnd when the median salary of your employees is $0/month (prototyping or a family domain or something) and your options are: a. Nothing b. $50/(employee/family member) What then? Of course no company paying $300,000/month is going to care about $50/user/year. Edit: Clarification
- ampersandy 14y agoWhy hasn't Google offered an option to increase from the default 25GB of email storage? Drive has an option to increase upto 16TB, but Gmail is locked at 25GB? What gives?
- cllns 14y agoI would like to see a breakdown (from google) of how much storage people use. I'd guess a majority use <1 GB, and I can't imagine many people need more than 25GB.
- ampersandy 14y agoMy comment is aimed at business users, not casual users. Several friends of mine have hit the cap with their business accounts and have had to consider alternative email providers because now they can't use their email accounts.
- cdcarter 14y agoThey used to offer it. I'm still grandfathered on a 30GB plan, which is wonderful. I occasionally get poke emails from Google asking me to upgrade to one of the new plans.
- therealarmen 14y agoPlease note this change has no impact on our existing customers, including those using the free version. I give it six months before they start strong-arming free users into paid accounts.
- sharkweek 14y agoDoubtful, plenty of people would jump on the chance to create a competitor, especially since they could market it as a cheaper (or free) alternative.
- joahua 14y agoIt's been nearly six years of free. That's pretty gradual strong-arming. Note that per user limits continue to apply, so people have as much incentive as they ever did to upgrade, plus for any new domains/projects people will naturally either migrate to other options (then consolidate services around these, moving themselves off Google) or start paying. Not convinced there's any need for hostility on either side.
- loceng 14y agoThis is to kill the competition; At minimum to gain a competitive advantage.
- antihero 14y agoI use it for a small activist group that I help run. There's just no way we'd have the budget for it.
- froo 14y agoI'm curious what happens with the people that are in limbo - that is still in their 30 day trial period and are unable to downgrade to a free version because of that.
- nosecreek 14y agoMe too. I just set up a client's email with Google Apps a couple of days ago intending to use the free version. Its going to be a big headache if they can't use the free offering.
- Steveism 14y agoThis is unfortunate indeed. The free Google Apps offering was a substantial value. What viable alternatives are there?
- dotBen 14y ago"Google Apps offering was a substantial value" ...yet you are not prepared to pay financially in exchange for that value, and even convey disappointment when the free provision of that value is ceased. blowing your comment out of context, but this misalignment with value and $ spend is a huge problem in our industry today.
- sabat 14y agoIt's just too goddamned much money for organizations that are small and are not funded startups. $50 per user per year -- if it was $5, they might have a deal, but having to cough up $500 annually for something that was originally free?
- lwat 14y agoYou could pay for it?
- Steveism 14y agoWell, obviously yes I could and so could my clients. But Free is the best kind of price, especially for startups. I have no problem paying for good software and services. I also have no problem seeking out the next option that compares in value. At this point Google Apps is a paid email option that must compete with all the other countless premium email options.
- lwat 14y agoIf a dollar a week is too much for what you get from this service then maybe you're doing something wrong, especially for startups where you're not going to have hundreds of employees.
- 14y ago
- dotBen 14y agoContrarian view... by offering <50 email accounts for free, Google essentially destroyed the market for any other startups or companies to come into the market and offer non-enterprise B2B email services... thus limiting competition and innovation. One could argue that the removal of the free tier at this point is simply because they've created an entrenched position, but one could also suggest that this creates a modicum of opportunity for another player to try to enter this space. Certainly until today the $ size of the addressable market in the small business email space was practically $0 given Google's position. [discuss :)]
- chrisblackwell 14y agoFastmail.fm has been around quite a while, and while I still would consider them a success, I don't think they have done much in the form of innovation. Most of the innovation I have seen in email for the year, has been in the form of the client, not the server.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- hobbes 14y agoFrom what I have read on the fastmail.fm blog, etc, they tend to do some very good stuff on the back-end, particularly(open source) contributions to the Cyrus IMAP server. These, I understand, have improved the failover and resilience of the IMAP server a lot. These might not be "innovations" in a technical sense, but they certainly make Cyrus a much better server for Enterprise users. The less said about fastmail.fm's "innovations" on their web interface the better.
- dbuxton 14y agoStill, $50/user/year doesn't give you that much room for manoeuvre as a startup...
- burke 14y agoIf someone's already committed to paying, they can be convinced to pay more. It's hard to convince someone getting something for free that they should start forking over dollars.
- philwelch 14y agoAny other decent, free IMAP hosts out there? Ever since the Gmail UI shit the bed and mail clients grew an archive button I don't really need Google Apps itself anymore anyway.
- KNoureen 14y agoIf you have the time for it, you could try a VPS and your own IMAP/SMTP-server and web-interface. I migrated off Google a year ago to my own server, took a day to sit down and understand/configure it and have since then run smoothly w/o me touching it. And since I host some other people's domains and mail for a small fee, I actually earn a few $ / year.
- zheng 14y agoWow. Google Apps for Your Domain is a huge thing for a lot of hackers. I run my entire family's email using it. Is google just giving up on supporting custom domains? That would be a huge disruption for me =(
- indiecore 14y agoI posted this below but I was really counting on Google Apps to set up a custom domain email address. I'm just starting some stuff and it's still very "free time" right now and I am really not going to spend 50 dollars a year on it yet.
- indiecore 14y agoGOD DAMNIT I was literally 10 minutes away from signing up.
- eikenberry 14y agoBe glad it came when it did. It would suck to just get all setup then find out the service has been deprecated. For everyone with an account, I suggest looking for an alternative soon.
- Margh 14y agoYerp, we signed up about a month ago and had pretty much just settled in over the past week. Hooray.
- thewordis 14y agoAccording to another blog post, you can still "switch to it" for the next 30 days. So maybe sign up for paid and then immediately switch to free? http://googleappsupdates.blogspot.com/2012/12/changes-to-google-apps-packages.html http://googleappsupdates.blogspot.com/2012/12/changes-to-goo...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- grandpoobah 14y agohttp://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2855120 http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2... I started the trial on or after December 6, 2012. You cannot downgrade to the free edition, but you have the option to purchase the product or to cancel your account.
- grandpoobah 14y agoOutlook.com
- zsiddique 14y agoThis might suck for the power user who had his own domain, but I am betting the free version was abused by a lot of business unwilling to pay a few bucks for the service.
- Firehed 14y agoWhat's the difference? The cost to Google is presumably the same, except that the user count might have been between two and ten-ish instead of one. And now they can't upsell those businesses to paid accounts anymore. Established businesses already have email in place, and switching them over will be a hell of a sell.
- alanctgardner2 14y agoI wonder if the cause of this is the support costs required for the free accounts? Obviously personal GMail is plug-and-play, but for someone who can't spell DNS, setting up a domain account was never quite drop-dead-simple enough. I suspect the goal here is to create a barrier to entry and prevent the inevitable support load of free users. There was an excellent post about this a while ago, where a developer reported much better treatment from users after charging a token fee for their app. As a final thought, maybe Google is catching on to the 'charge what something is worth, not what it costs you' way of thinking. Hosted email solutions for enterprise aren't free, and it seems like Google has realized the real value of their product. Also, ~$4/seat/month is pretty well in line with this kind of SaaS offering.
- georgemcbay 14y agoI doubt the support costs were very much. As with all things Google other than being an adsense buyer, support was basically "send us an email and we'll respond with a robo-faq that may or may not have anything to do with your question". And Google Apps was actually quite easy to setup, partly because Google documented it pretty well but mostly because many DNS providers would basically do a one-click Google Apps setup automatically for you.
- lawdawg 14y agoGoogle Apps for Business has 24/7 phone support. Maybe you would know that if you actually used Google Apps for Business or read the blog post.
- cynix 14y ago> Google Apps for Business has 24/7 phone support. Not for the free version.
- tytso 14y agoGiven that there were people who would try to use the free version for their business, and then kvetch (on HN and/or other major technology blogs) when their account was hijacked and they lost business critical access and couldn't recover quickly because they didn't have the 24/7 phone support, it might actually be better that the free version is getting sunset....
- spankalee 14y agoAs a Googler and for much longer, a Google Apps user for my family, this is sad news. I wish they had just fixed the experience for "vanity domains" so that they didn't require all the enterprise features, and didn't let administrators have complete control of users accounts. Then they could roll out new features to vanity users without needing the enterprise controls. I understand that this is a little tricky, and involves no paying customers, but Google Apps was by far the best experience for custom domains. I'm sure it attracted the type of influencers that pull even more users. I used it for my family, bands, friends with very small businesses and more, and the other people on those domains not already using Gmail, in turn migrated their personal accounts to Gmail.
- rgsteele 14y agoI completely agree with this. I signed up for Google Apps for the sole purpose of having an email address at my own domain, and I always wished I could just have that email address supported by my existing Gmail account, rather than having to deal with the hassle of yet another account somewhere. I would gladly have paid for that. Google's always been pretty good about making sure you aren't locked in to their services, likely due to the efforts of their Data Liberation Front[1], but it always seemed to me that being locked in to using an @gmail.com email address was a big exception to this. [1] http://www.dataliberation.org/ http://www.dataliberation.org/
- spankalee 14y agoYes, there's really two parts to a "vanity" domain: I want a nice looking email address, and I want to own my email address no matter what service I use. It's nice to be able to also use an awesome service like Gmail on top of it. It's worth some value to me, but $50/user/year is a bit much for a family of ~5 light email users.
- ikailan 14y agoI think this is only for new customers, not existing ones.
- zmmmmm 14y agoI really hate it when companies try to sugar coat a decision that is all downside for their customers. It may be really hard to do, but Google should just come out and say it: there is no upside for this to anyone except Google. It is not about giving you a better experience or making things more straightforward. It is all about Google deciding to maximize their profits at the expense of their users. That's fine, it's what businesses (ultimately) do (even the ones that pretend they put their users first). Google should just say it - they no longer want to support a free version of their product because they can make more money another way. When I see ridiculous sugar coating it breeds distrust and disbelief - congratulations Google, I now believe every single future thing you say a little less, well done.
- indiecore 14y ago>When I see ridiculous sugar coating it breeds distrust and disbelief - congratulations, I now believe every single future thing you say a little less, well done. And I will especially distrust any new "free" services you decide to offer.
- aeturnum 14y agoIt seems like the current free customers are just fine ("Please note this change has no impact on our existing customers, including those using the free version."), so how would it cause you to distrust their offers in the future?
- indiecore 14y agobecause I was about to be a free user but they cut this process off between me checking it out at the end of work and me getting home. All I wanted was a custom email address but I'm not paying 50 dollars a year for something I can manage on my own and thus I'll never be exposed to whatever else was in Google Apps.
- jeremyjh 14y agoWhat he's talking about about is not Google's new pricing/business model, or even how they treat their customers. What he is talking about is that this announcement contains several statements that are complete bullshit. But, that is pretty much required for big corporate PR people. It isn't their fault that this is how they have to express themselves: " but time has shown that in practice, the experience isn't quite right for either group."
- redthrowaway 14y agoWhat really struck me was that they're only offering three nines of uptime. I can't see many businesses ditching Excel or Word to go with something that will cost you half a day of productivity every year, especially not for $50 a license.
- ams6110 14y agoWhat's the "nines" of uptime on a typical corporate desktop? By my back of the envelope calculations it's worse than 3.
- toomuchtodo 14y agoI'll take "Google downtime" (a damn small amount) over any other sort of downtime (Rackspace, AWS US-EAST-1, the hardware on my desk) any day of the week.
- janlukacs 14y agoSame here :)
- redthrowaway 14y agoEven so, it's not like they're replacing the desktop. This is in addition to the downtime they can already expect.
- acchow 14y agoNo. If your computer needs a restart, or an OS update, or a reformat, or got run over by a car you have downtime. With Google Apps, you just keep going on your other laptop/tablet/smartphone/friend's computer/etc.
- ygjb 14y agoIt really depends how much they go into the Google Apps bit; for $50 you are not getting word and excel, you are getting a whole range of related IT services, including online document sharing with access controls. That in and of itself is worth a huge amount of money.
- thpoul 14y agoI wonder how this will affect the various hosts around who offer easy "free" google apps integration.
- gm_ 14y agoDreamhost has added a disclaimer: (Google may charge you to use this feature.) Also, when you attempt to sign up, the link redirects to a google apps free trial page.
- confluence 14y agoSo for hackers it's what? $50 a year for hosting + $10 a year of domain registration for vanity URLs - that's $5 a month. Don't see much of a problem here - I'm surprised they didn't do this sooner - I'm happy to pay for this service at that price - no problem.
- lawdawg 14y agowhoa whoa whoa, but now its not FREE, and I'm entitled to awesome products for FREE.
- loceng 14y agoI'd imagine this would be ad-free, too..
- timv 14y agoDepends what you need to host. If you just want email & a blog, gandi.net will providing hosting for those as part of their domain registration (~$15 per year, depending on which TLD you want). They also include minimal web hosting with registration too, but last I looked their (free) offering was so bad it didn't really count as a feature. I imagine some other domain registrars have similar options.
- nicholassmith 14y agoI got a domain through gandi and decided to try my email there for a change, it's been pretty reliable and solid, the only time I needed support it was quick. I don't however do a lot of email so my experience might be much different to a power email user.
- edj 14y agoI'm not sure if I'm parsing this correctly, but it sounds like people who use Google Apps as an email backend for personal email on custom domains will now have to pay $50/year. If so, that's a huge bummer. I only recently switched to running my email this way and I don't relish the thought of migrating elsewhere so soon. I would happily pay $50/year (or perhaps more... I don't know how high I'd go) for email that's not only convenient and spam free, but also well protected from governments and the provider's employees, and not data mined. I have absolutely no use for phone support or 99.9 uptime for my personal email. So the businessification of Google mail is not a win for me. Privacy and convenience or what I'm after. Anyone working on something like this?
- digikata 14y agoI think you missed this sentence. "Please note this change has no impact on our existing customers, including those using the free version." Still, I'm on free google apps mostly for a personal email domain too and will likely start considering alternatives just in case. I'd also note that the $50/year is also per user, so there's sort of an opening to offer a family, personal domain type service. For a family of a maybe 2-6 users, the $50/year-user is a bit steep if you're mostly looking for a small group email + calendaring. Maybe that would even be an interesting vector for starting a new family-based social networking service.
- edj 14y agoI did miss that. Thanks for pointing that out. I actually considered an email address like firstname@lastname.com. I figured I could add my parents, or future children. But this only works for obscure last names or unusual TLDs. There's also the issue of family relationships - people get divorced, grow up and want more independence, etc. Marrying email to a family domain could be messy.
- X-Istence 14y agoI do exactly that, bertjw@regeer.org. I've set up accounts for everyone else in the family, but most if not all just have it set up as a forwarder to another gmail account.
- gtt 14y agoOn a related note could dear hn crowd suggest email provider (maybe paid, say up to 30-40$ annually) caring about my privacy a little bit more? Really delete my messages when I want to is a good start. Google is all good but I feel I should not put all of my emails in one account..
- hmart 14y agoRackspace mail $2 per month / account
- Tortoise 14y agoI've been using https://www.fastmail.fm/ https://www.fastmail.fm/ forever, nothing but good things to say
- gregd 14y agohttp://www.cotse.net/ http://www.cotse.net/
- atourgates 14y agoI setup one small business on http://atmail.com/products/ http://atmail.com/products/ cloud - which seems to work pretty well. It's $2/user/month, most beautiful webmail client I've seen, calendars, contacts, etc... And, if you'd rather run your own server, you can of course just buy their software. But I don't have any experience running that.
- jamesmiller5 14y agoI use Google Apps for my domain but forward the mail to another account which means I see no ads and get hosted mail for free. I didn't even realize until this announcement that I'm probably a net negative and probably not the only person doing this.
- jtbarrett 14y agoI have a free Google Apps account mostly so that I can have a custom domain for my small (free) App Engine site: https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/domain https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/domain It's sad that now attaching a custom domain will cost a lot more than the domain itself.
- Strom 14y agoYou can still create a free Google Apps account, limited to a single user, through App Engine [1], Google just doesn't want to advertise this fact to everyone. [1] - https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine/pVZfdeky-ow/TO1SmipM2Y0J https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine/pVZfdeky-ow...
- darkhorn 14y agoHow you create an account using app engine. I cannot see anything in the Administration Panel.
- rdl 14y agoI gave up on Google Apps for your Domain for email a while ago (security, bugs, and the general black box nature of the product). Right now, my favorite solution is Kerio Connect, which you can either self-host or purchase as a cloud solution. There are hosting providers who will handle all of this for you, but having the option to bring mail fully in house is really nice. It's essentially Exchange, but much easier to manage, and far cheaper. They also have a Sharepoint/Box alternative, Workspace, that I now love. I'm more than happy paying $555 for a server and then $45/user for license, $15/user/year maintenance, and hosting costs. I really don't think $50-100/mo/user (once you factor in admin/hosting costs...you could do it for $20-30/mo but $50-100 is a safer budget) is an unreasonable amount for top quality email and collaboration tools.
- larsberg 14y agoUgh. The worst thing is that I've been relying on my personal domain e-mail address _also_ being a valid google address. So I have to either pony up for my family's accounts or move us all and re-create logins on a page or so of "authorized apps." Still, the huge amount of spam that's been getting through (10-15 per day, despite always logging in to the gmail web interface and clicking Report Spam) has been encouraging me to consider a move anyway. This change is just the nudge I needed to finally make it happen...
- stevoski 14y agoYes, the announcement is corporate doublespeak. No, I don't mind the end of free Google Apps. I use Google Apps for my business for five years, and frankly, it is mind-boggling what they have given me for free. Luckily us existing users still get the free service, but if I had to pay US$50 per year per user, I would still consider it exceptional value. US$50 per year for a set of critical, heavily-used services is an inconsequential amount for all but the most penny-pinching operation.
- indiecore 14y agoand they lost a lot of people who are pinching pennies when they start but would be hooked into the system by the time they needed the upgrade.
- adrianm 14y agoI would have (read: I did) assume that, but do we really have any data on whether or not this actually was the case? Google presumably considered this and made a decision based on the data available to them. Now that this decision was announced, it seems that this assumption is false. Google must not be hooking nearly enough businesses into using this system for money or they would not have made this decision. Of course, this assumes Google Apps is run by rational people.
- speleding 14y agoThe free Google Apps was perfect for families: give each kid a nice kid@familyname.com and no problem with the silly 18 year limit that gmail has. The shared calendars work great in our family too. It's certainly not worth $50 per year because the little ones get maybe 1 email a month from grandma. Since Google does not allow kids on gmail, where should families go now?
- mokash 14y agoI never thought about using Google Apps like this. It actually sounds pretty cool to be honest. If my whole family was using it, then I'd probably consider paying $50/year for the service.
- mcherm 14y agoBut would you pay $50/family-member? (Which is presumably a significantly bigger amount of money.)
- brewdad 14y agoExactly. I am in the same boat. I set up the family with individual, personalized addresses and a series of calendars that can be shared between all of us or just my wife and I. It's convenient, but not $200+/yr convenient. For now, nothing changes but I guess it's time to start looking around for a cheaper alternative should Google decide to kill off the free tier altogether.
- duckworth 14y agoYeah, Same situation here. Set up my family and one for my in-laws, and a few others. Not worth $50 a month per family member.
- mokash 14y agoOh yeah, I completely forgot that it was $50/year/person. It would have been nice to have an option for $50/year for an account equivalent to the free version that they're taking away.
- eunice 14y agoRe: everybody saying this was a 'free' service - Google were still harvesting & selling off anything you put in there. It wasn't truly free.
- nvmc 14y agoI sorted out my gmail powered trendy n@me-lastname.net email not two weeks ago. Perhaps if they offered a single user package free of charge it would be more sustainable.
- napoleond 14y agoI think it's time for a dedicated email service provider with full search functionality and tools to migrate the old inbox from Google Apps. I would gladly pay more than $50/year for a simple, rock solid service like this if it had an excellent web client, real customer support, and cared about my privacy.
- dholowiski 14y agoI would too. Does such a service exist right now?
- napoleond 14y agoNope, not that I know of. Closest thing is probably http://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/rackspace_email/ http://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/rackspace_email/ which is painful to use in a browser. I'm seriously considering starting such a service.
- Nux 14y agohttps://www.fastmail.fm/ https://www.fastmail.fm/ is probably the closest thing to it
- napoleond 14y agoThat does look pretty good, thanks! I'd heard of fastmail before, but thought they were just a hotmail clone (personal, not business). EDIT: https://www.zoho.com/mail https://www.zoho.com/mail looks pretty good, too, and is the least expensive of the pack.
- tlogan 14y agoThis is actually expected development. As the market matures, it is time to start make money. This is also means that probably less and less of online services will be free. Of course, you will still have "Walmarts of the online services" but you will get what you pay for - nothing more. And I don't think there will be "cheaper" alternatives: but I do expect emergence of more expensive and better alternatives (if you can fork $50/year than you can fork $100/year - free is different story).
- hmart 14y agoAn alternative I use for educational customers is Microsoft Live Domains, also have some comercial domains with more than 50 accounts. But given this situation with Google I`m expecting Microsoft to do the same
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- rajuvegesna 14y agoGoogle made a mistake initially by 1) Giving too much away for free and 2) Charging too low. It is probably trying to correct these mistakes. 1) On giving too much away… Remember, Google Apps started with 200 free users, later reduced it to 100, then to 50, then to 10 and now to zero. http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/23/google-puts-the-squeeze-on-free-apps/ http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/23/google-puts-the-squeeze-on-... At 200 free users, there was no room for a new entrant in the market. I am glad that didn't last long. 2) On Charging too low... Back when they launched it, $50/user/year was extremely aggressive pricing. Vendors were charging $50/month. May be Google is realizing they were charging too low. I now see an additional plan with $10/user/month option (which didn't exist earlier). Disclaimer: I work for Zoho, competition to Google Apps.
- cynix 14y ago> Remember, Google Apps started with 200 free users And when Google Apps first started, you could request to increase the number of free users. I have an old account with a quota of 500 free users.
- GFischer 14y agoI was going to suggest Zoho as an alternative - I have my personal email set up with you guys :) , and had no problems whatsoever. However, I'm still used to Gmail's web interface, so I redirect my mail there.
- benaiah 14y agoOutlook.com's equivalent offering, https://domains.live.com https://domains.live.com, is free (Hotmail also offered it, but they've changed the branding). I've been running my email on there for the better part of a decade. To those who point at Office 365, that's similar but different, and it costs money. If you want a guide, this one seems pretty good: http://www.omegaweb.com/2012/09/how-to-configure-a-custom-domain-with-outlook-com/ http://www.omegaweb.com/2012/09/how-to-configure-a-custom-do... Between the mistaken despair over having no good free alternatives to Google Apps and the platitudes and awe over the Gmail/Google Drive integration (which Hotmail/Skydrive have had the exact equivalent of for years) a couple weeks back, I'm starting to wonder why nobody here, when they are all quite tech-literate, seems to have any clue about Microsoft's honestly rather impressive cloud offering. Most likely they're all in denial.
- 18pfsmt 14y agoWhen I last looked, IMAP was not available on the free custom domains. Is that still the case?
- benaiah 14y agoIMAP is not, but the superior Exchange ActiveSync protocol is, through m.outlook.com - despite the name, it's just Exchange, so it works anywhere. See http://help.outlook.com/en-gb/140/bb896613.aspx http://help.outlook.com/en-gb/140/bb896613.aspx for more details.
- davidcollantes 14y ago"Superior", ha!
- benaiah 14y agoErm, yes, it is superior, as it has all the capability of IMAP and more. See this: http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2007/07/10/3403386.aspx http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2007/07/10/34033....
- rwhitman 14y agoI'll tell you what the free plan was most useful for: business experiments. I can't tell you how many small forays into new business ideas I and other folks I know have used google apps to kick off. For a business at high risk of failure and no budget in the early idea stages it was so useful to be able to stitch together a team and workflow really quickly using google apps to see how things pan out. This puts a real damper on kicking off new collaborative ideas
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- z-factor 14y agoFor people who just need email forwarding https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ work great. They charge $0.02/forwarded domain/day. So ~7USD per year per domain. I'm a customer for 5+ years, no complaints.
- cwb71 14y agoElephant killing and hideous website aside, GoDaddy forwards up to 100 addresses for free with domain registration.
- tikhonj 14y agoWow, now I feel really lucky that I signed up for a free account just a couple of weeks ago. Then again, being forced to find my own email hosting would have made me less dependent on Google, which may have been a good thing...
- fakeer 14y agoAgree. I really think it's a bad idea to be tied to an ecosystem for all your needs. I, for one, would sure want to Keep all my chat contacts to some other service than Google/Gmail, Calendar with an independent provider. Unfortunately, unlike Calendar and some other services services like SNS and Chat are dependent upon what and where your other friends are. I would love it if I can have my own chat setup and I can chat with my friends on GTalk and Facebook (no, I don't personally know anyone who uses Yahoo any more or used other services like AIM ever at all).
- tikhonj 14y agoGoogle chat actually uses Jabber[1]. I believe nothing stops you from using some other Jabber service with GChat. [1]: http://www.jabber.org/ http://www.jabber.org/ Now Facebook, of course, is another story. My impression is that they use a technology based on Jabber but not compatible with anything outside of Facebook. I could be wrong--I simply never use Facebook chat.
- jscheel 14y agoI would be happy with a one-time fee to use my domain name. I don't care about anything else, just the domain name on the email address.
- tjbiddle 14y agoWow, I actually just called Google Apps support the other day for one of my domains to get downgraded back to free G Apps (I had unintentionally signed up for a 30-day trial of Business, and it didn't auto-downgrade, it just suspended my account). Bummer to see this though, I have multiple domains (As I'm sure many do here) and it's nice having a quick setup for one or two @domain.com's.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- hmart 14y agoI'm from a SouthAmerican nation, here the IT budget of small business is pretty limited and Google Apps (even with the 10 accounts limit) was a viable option for them. Google will have to adapt the prices for non USA markets (BRIC, EMEA, Latam) if they want to succeed. Also this movement bring space of innovation for email.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- antihero 14y agoI don't see what they'd lose from offering this free to personal users and non-profits? They do free mail hosting anyway so why prevent it being configurable to a certain domain?
- technotony 14y agoAny competitor products out there which are still free? All I want is email for my domains.
- smiler 14y agoSurely this should be a lesson that maybe free isn't always the best option...
- gprasanth 14y agoJust the other day I was looking for ways to offer email@mydomain to people who request it. I found that GApps was no longer offering free email. So, I ended up using Forwarders in cPanel to do the thing for me. Forwarders in cPanel simply copy all incoming mail to email@mydomain to myother@email. If I didn't already create an email account email@mydomain, the incoming mail WILL NOT be stored on server which makes this a feasible solution. If I had, incoming mail would be copied to myother@email.
- carlsednaoui 14y agoHas anyone tried Zoho? https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html
- luckysh0t 14y agoI signed up my domain for google apps as soon as I registed it about 3 hours ago. Must have been one of the last ones - I noticed they had taken the small text link on the apps homepage away and I had to click through to pricing to get the free version. Obviously Google had kicked off their deployment while I was registering. Totally taking this as a sign for my next app btw.
- therandomguy 14y agoOh come on... can we just have the gmail piece for free? If you want limit it to 5 addresses so that only really poor hackers use free account and they become your paying customers as soon as they find some traction.
- kristofferR 14y agoWow, I'm so glad I'm grandfathered in! I have 8 users, just for me. Having to spend $400 on my email (or spend a lot of time either switching or combining mail accounts) every year would be hell.
- coopdog 14y agoI wonder how this will effect the Google Apps Marketplace https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/?pli=1 https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/?pli=1 At the very least there will be less potential customers now. I imagine some people would have been willing to pay $0 to Google and $15 per user per month for some kind of project management offering, now it's $65 per month, which is really going to hurt new sign ups. Also for anyone with an existing free account who wants to add new domains, don't forget you can add domain alias's. So you keep the same account but just make it so email from two+ different domains can come in. For tiny ideas that always have the same 1-2 employees it's almost preferable to a whole new account anyway.
- tszming 14y agoThis might be painful at the beginning but it could be a win-win situation in long term for most parties: 1. Google: can focus on customer service, 2. Google's share holders: more revenue, 3. Competitors: more competitive advantages, 4. Startups: time to disrupt, 5. Users: Email should be decentralized, why rely on a single provider is a good thing?
- kurrent 14y agoso will users who pay the $50/year still see ads on their inbox page?
- level09 14y agonope, the premium version is ad-free.
- foxylad 14y agoI have no problem paying for a Google Apps account where I actually use Google apps, but at the moment you have to have a Google Apps account to link a domain to an Appengine app. Some of our apps have two or three domains showing the same app, and because you need to have an account for each email address that Appengine sends email from, we have three or four accounts (support, noreply, accounts per domain. So this move is going to add $600 per year to our costs - all for virtual accounts that don't actually use Google Apps at all. Hopefully this was unintended, and Google will continue to provide free accounts for domains linked to Appengine apps - or provide another mechanism for linking and authorising sending addresses.
- callmevlad 14y agoFrom the post: > Please note this change has no impact on our existing customers, including those using the free version.
- X-Istence 14y agoHe is specifically stating that as of right now if you want to use Google AppEngine to send email you need to have a Google Apps account. So after today (no more free accounts) if I want to set up example.com as a domain to send email from on my Google AppEngine webapp, I will have to fork over X amount of money a year to have those essentially non-existent users that are valid mailboxes.
- wyck 14y agoCreate a start-up with: 3 way email sync (mobile/web/desktop) like exchange server (or other enterprise stuff) A slick feature rich UI Custom domains via MX Solid spam filtering There is nothing out there that does this for under 10$/month per user and I think there is a solid market for a better price point.
- stock_toaster 14y ago> There is nothing out there that does this for under 10$/month per user and I think there is a solid market for a better price point. You realize Google Apps is $50/yr (around $4.16 per month) per user, right?
- rustc 14y agoNot to hijack this thread, but I've asked a question [1] about how to setup an email server on a VPS, if anyone could help me(us?) out. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4885281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4885281
- medell 14y ago2011-07-20: Announces Google Labs will be shutdown 2012-07-03: iGoogle will be "retired" on 2012-11-01 2012-12-06: Google Apps no longer free I'm not liking the direction they're going as I use all of the above frequently (including signing up new domains for GApps regularly). It always comes down to money at the end of the day.
- ErikAugust 14y agoOkay, one MacGyver solution - Buy one user account - set up a ton of aliases. Set up filters to Gmail inboxes. Yeah, that feels dirty... I know.
- gregd 14y agoYou can only have 20 domain aliases per account.
- blhack 14y agoHuh. Just want to point out that one of the main reasons we're using google apps at my company is that I use google apps for hosting my personal email. When it came time to make a decision on that, and I am the one who makes that decision, I chose google apps because it was already familiar to me. Poor choice, imho. I'm curious what the actual overhead is for people like me. I have 1 account (as in: 1 email address) that is hosted by google apps. I was going to set up an account for one of my other domains, but not for $50/year. (Per account!) So full snark here, but it was between google apps, and office 365. I chose GA because o my familiarity with it. But look here, Microsoft's equivalent offering is free: https://domains.live.com/ https://domains.live.com/ I wonder what things will look like when we evaluate google apps next year?
- TheCowboy 14y agoYou can still setup a forwarding address and change the reply-to address, so users can use regular Gmail for free. It just means that your company will not have control over the account. Unfortunately, I don't think threatening to leave when you're not paying anything is really a threat at all. $50/year per year is still pretty reasonable for the services provided. The other option is that Google retires this feature completely, as they've done with other services people might have been willing to pay for, and that seems worse as you have no choice.
- blhack 14y agoWe're not paying nothing per year, we're paying almost $10,000 per year. I understand this is effectively nothing for google; my point was that the reason we signed up for GA to begin with was directly related to my experience with it as a free way of hosting my personal domains' email.
- vacri 14y agoI doubt google would have made the decision without considering the advertising impact of the free product.
- nigelsampson 14y ago
- vishal0123 14y agoIts a result of a/b testing done 5 months earlier: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/03/free-google-apps-sign-up-page-removed-a-sign-of-new-changes-to-come/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/03/free-google-apps-sign-up-pa...
- dave_sullivan 14y agoWell... fair enough. If you use google apps already, nothing changes (if I'm reading this correctly?) If you're thinking about using google apps, you've got to pay for it now. Yes, this benefits no one but google. Then again, google has been providing benefit to millions of people with google apps. Running your own e-mail server is not trivial. There's a reason there are no good gmail alternatives--it's harder than it looks. If I were them, I would have charged for it from the beginning--it's a really useful service. And they could have been real dicks by forcing all current free users to start coughing up dough.
- awicklander 14y agoGoogle decides to charge money for providing a valuable service. Crazy!
- Gustomaximus 14y agoI hope they don't do this with Google Analytics next. Not just because it is a great product to get for free (I'm a massive fan vs other systems). To me it would seem wrong to come into the market @ free, wipe out or reduce much of the competitors and then expect everyone to pay up now they have a market dominance.
- davidandgoliath 14y agoThey won't. They get data on 100% of your user's / visitors this way and can use that data to advertise to them via their search engine.
- alextingle 14y agoRunning your own e-mail server is easy. I can't believe how many people here are throwing up their hands in horror at the idea.
- jws 14y agoAfter decades of running my own email servers I gave up because of the never ending blacklisting. Some random ISP will decide that your IP address is in a bad neighborhood and blacklist you. Eventually one of your users will realize that their mail to Aunt Vickie isn't getting through and you'll spend an hour trying to get unblacklisted. You may or may not succeed. If you own your own block C or larger this may not apply, but if you are renting servers or using a colo there is woe to be had.
- ing33k 14y agoany good alternatives ?
- wildchild 14y agoI am confused, if I am google apps oldfag and have 20 accounts. According to http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&topic=29190&ctx=topic&answer=2855120 http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&topic=29... can I still use it like before or I must remove 10 mailboxes to fit 10 requirement to continue free usage?
- nikcub 14y agoGoogle under Larry Page is obsessed with short-term revenue. They did the same with AppEngine, Maps and now Apps. Not to mention that I cringed throughout this announcement. They are doing it because it benefits users? C'mon, just tell us you love the money, nothing wrong with that.
- jemeshsu 14y agoIt might be a sign that advertising revenue is not growing as expected. My guess.
- tnuc 14y agoDoes this mean that some of my domains that are going expire might be worth money as they have google apps?
- callmeed 14y agoCrap, ALL our customers use google apps for email (because we don't want to host email on our servers and it's free). All our customers are small businesses (photographers, designers) and usually just make 1 to 3 mailboxes. Any alternative out there?
- vmialik 14y agoThe free accounts should stay free. However opening new accounts will not be free :(
- pbreit 14y agoAt one point Yahoo was tip-toeing into this market with its Zimbra purchase. I wonder if this move prompts Yahoo to look again? $50 per email account per year leaves a lot of room for competition.
- ramsevak 14y agoActually they forcing small business to move towards hotmail. Spending $500/year for e-mail service is not worth for small (offline) business.
- davidandgoliath 14y agoJust over a dollar day isn't worth it? I'd disagree. But with that said there are reasonable alternatives out there for less.
- laacz 14y agoYou can still send and receive e-mail to classic @gmail.com setting up default reply-from address to you@yourdomain.com.
- mokash 14y agoI use Google Apps with my personal domain. A lot of people are recommending alternatives but the main reason why I like Google Apps is that I can use it to easily sign into YouTube, Google Docs and various other services that they provide with my personal, official email address. I use Google Apps for a small blog that I run and I gave out email addresses to all of the writers. Eventually we had 11 writers and they only allow 10 free so I upgraded that one. People can't do that now. It's either all or nothing. Meh, their loss. May have to go with Microsoft's alternative or something.
- yitchelle 14y agoGoogle apps for education is still free (I wonder for how long.) At least google is focusing on charging for things that are revenue generating, however for some education enterprise, that is debatable. http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/education/ http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/education/
- 4lun 14y agoFound a workaround to still sign up for the standard plan, modify the following URL to include your domain: http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/standard/selectDomain?existingDomain=YOURDOMAIN.COM&newDomain=false&ownDomain=true http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/standard/selectDomain?existin... Likely to be disabled very soon.
- 6ren 14y agoGoogle believes the cloud/apps have enough providers now, so they aren't needed to drive it. Their strategy is to grow the web. This works because they make more money from the web being used. It also makes people love Google, which is important because switching search engines is easy. The love also helps in hiring. However... they have introduced internal cost accounting, so that products must pay their way - a little internal market. IMHO, this is potentially dangerous, since there already is a market (the real one), and it ignores the advantages of a firm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm) But they don't follow it absolutely, e.g. android isn't paying its way. (NB: Apple is focussed on making better products, not on growing the web). If google can see that other firms are better placed to do a better job of growing the web in some respect (or they can apply pressure on them to do so), they are happy to step aside.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Nux 14y agoWell, they probably filled their belly with enough user-base, now they can ignore the rest and focus on cashing in.
- intlect 14y agoA few years ago they were inadvertently dropping the link to the free signup... now they've killed the product. Not fun... http://googleenterprise.blogspot.ro/2009/07/google-apps-standard-edition-still-free.html http://googleenterprise.blogspot.ro/2009/07/google-apps-stan...
- iashishsinha 14y agohttp://www.nextbigwhat.com/google-apps-free-for-new-domains-using-existing-accounts-297/ http://www.nextbigwhat.com/google-apps-free-for-new-domains-... : This is a nice workaround. Try it out. You can still use it for free using the existing account.
- camus 14y agoCould someone explain me why a business providing a service should ? give it for free ? are google engineers working for free ? is google running its servers for free ? so yes , google is rich , but so is your electricity company , most gaz companies and most supermarkets. Do they give you stuffs for free ? "freemium" model is dead , in the future you'll pay for every service you use on the web.
- brandonfish 14y agoyes, your electricity company cannot earn money using ads. google's business is mostly built on ads. see the difference?
- michaelbuddy 14y agoI agree with you on some points here, but your statement, 'freemium is dead' makes no sense. Gmail and all included apps is the free and Google Apps (business) is the pay premium. If anything the model is seen fully validated here, not dead.
- mrcrassic 14y ago$50 for only THREE 9's? NO THANKS. :p It sucks that they've removed the free version; it's definitely a step up from managing multiple individual gmail accounts or creating a shared account of some sort. (I use one for one of the side jobs I do; it's a pain in the ass.) However, $50/year for premium is really friggin good, considering that the cheapest alternative is $10/mo ($100/yr) for hosted Exchange 2010 alone.
- smallegan 14y agoI wonder how soon it will be before they eliminate free domestic calling on Google Voice?
- jemeshsu 14y agoI hope Google can offer a cheaper plan for those who needs only domain and email.
- amitagrawal 14y agoWith this decision, I have now come to believe that Google is not the company that it used to be in the past. The user-friendly company with a quirky personality. Somewhere in the mindless fighting with becoming the dominant social and mobile force on the planet, it has forgotten about the very users it once strived to please. This has been more apparent since Larry took over Google as the CEO. His "more wood behind fewer arrows" has somewhere down the line taken away the humor with which Google has largely operated. 20% time? Google Labs? Hugely popular Google products scrapped into oblivion. The only products that matter beyond search are - Android, Google+, YouTube and Google Apps which are fairly mature by now and are a serious threat to competitors. The thing is they didn't need to do it because they aren't starving of computing resources for more important products and the marginal costs of adding free users is almost nil (although it exists). I somehow feel betrayed by this decision. Google, so far, has resisted the temptation to shut down products that were important to it's users unlike other companies like Microsoft and Yahoo! I have been using Google Apps since they launched it a long ago. It feels like bait and switch. This is completely right and there is nothing wrong with them shutting down a free service as a business but somehow it feels so non-Googly.
- netfire 14y agoSeems like a strange move by Google. Most small or starting businesses don't need a 25GB inbox (at least not every user) or 24/7 tech support. Why create the barrier to entry? Now people with businesses will be more likely to use personal Google accounts for business or look for alternative services. Why not just create a premium business account option that gives you this level of storage and support if you need it, instead of trying to convince your users that they need it, when most of them are happy without it. Personally, I liked the direction Google was heading with their Google Drive product. You get up to 5GB for free and then pay for more if you need it. Makes me wonder how Google might try to monetize other products like Google+ once they have a substantial following.
- kevando 14y agoDoes this mean my old domains with 50 free users are now worth more?? :)
- tharris0101 14y agoI'm confused here. It says nothing changes for existing customers but when I log into my domain's Google App dashboard I see this now: "Free 30 day Google Apps for Business trial" with an upgrade button. Does anyone else see this?
- tharris0101 14y agoTo answer my own question. I see now that it isn't saying that I am currently using a free trial, the button is to upgrade and get the free trial. This is important though. DO NOT TRY THE FREE TRIAL UNLESS YOU PLAN ON STICKING WITH IT. After yesterday, even if you have a legacy free account, you give up that privilege if you try the free 30 days. See here: http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60755 http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6...
- jarjoura 14y agoNot to change the subject, but this decision just made my switch to Office 365 that much sweeter. If anything I love that I get push notifications (active sync) for emails and group calendars work much better.
- admiralpumpkin 14y agoI just did a little research to see what alternatives are out there for custom domain emails. I haven't used these Namecheap for email, though I have used them for domain hosting after the SOPA debacle. Namecheap offers custom domain email hosting for $2.99/user/year. 3GB storage. Supports IMAP. 50MB attachment limit. No ads. No clue on the web interface quality, nor spam-filtering quality, but it's definitely a good price from a good company.
- admiralpumpkin 14y agoIn reading the comments generally I feel like there's two main groups being affected here: small businesses and small groups (families, geeks, whatever). The first group—small businesses—can of course afford $50/user/year, even if they would rather not spend it. The second group—enthusiasts—even if they could afford it, likely cannot justify $50/user/year. I personally have a custom email hosted by Google for a small group of my friends, and I know that there is NO WAY any of us would pay $50 each per year. The price would need to be an order of magnitude lower for us to consider it. (Yes, I know that for the moment we're grandfathered in.) Seems like there should be a way for Google to distinguish between the two groups based on services needed and then price two tiers accordingly. For example, offer a Small Group Plan at $5/user/year with a limit of 10 users & no phone support; and another Small Business Plan that offers up to 50 users, limited phone support & whatever else help small businesses for a higher price.
- TheYComb 14y agoI would even pay $50 a year if Google stopped making "improvements" to the UI. The new composer looks nice at first but it slows me down when I need to use different fonts, etc AND they removed background color AKA highlight. I do not use Evernote just because they do not have highlight... and now they decided to removed it from Gmail too. If it is not broken, don't fix it :-/
- circa 14y agobummer. the first thing I do when I buy a new domain is sign up there. they make it so easy to manage. all good things must come to an end I guess.