I think it's easily worth $50 a year even for a single user with a personal domain, but then again, I'm kind of particular with my email. Whenever I need to use

I think it's easily worth $50 a year even for a single user with a personal domain, but then again, I'm kind of particular with my email. Whenever I need to use an email address, I use sitename.com@mydomain.com. Since only my family and friends use my real email address, everything else is easier to filter/label, and if some site gives my address out it's easy to track down who it was. To do this without having to manually create each address before I used it, I had to enable a catch-all address for my domain. Originally, I had my hosting provider (who are great) as the MX and they would simply forward it all on to Gmail. Well, sooner or later they determined that the massive amount of was killing their server, and politely asked if I could either disable the catch-all or find another MX (though they weren't firing me as a customer, yet). Even though my host has always been reasonable, $100ish/yr with them wasn't enough for me to use email the way that I intended. This is where Google Apps comes in -- they are now my MX, and so my host is happy and my email arrives faster than it did before. In that light, $50/yr is a steal! Being grandfathered in as free is a nice loyalty-builder, hopefully it stays free.