I was a proud owner of Nexus phones, Google Fi subscriber, Google Music (YouTube Premium) subscriber, I've purchased apps and tv content on Google Play, and I also started paying for Google Drive storage after they removed the free unlimited photo backups. I had YouTube TV for a time. Having a powerful Gsuite service was a driving factor into the Google ecosystem for me.

I've been slowly pulling out of Google's services as they've been shutdown, renamed, etc. This will be the ultimate drive off of their services for me. By wanting an extra $6/month/user, they are now losing out on a lot more. I'm sure that my situation isn't unique.

Dyn.com (nee DynDNS, in the dialup days) was bought out by Oracle, my nearly 20 year old lifetime VIP account will be terminated in May despite using a few thousand requests per month and in the past highly recommending their extortionately priced but rather excellent global load balancer and enterprise anycast services (to the tune of thousands of dollars per month).

Likewise with Google, I had an original G1 phone and several iterations of the Pixel, have migrated several companies over to their excellent their cloud offerings, again to the tune of tens of thousands per month.

It just feels like I'm getting the shitty end of the stick here. In both cases I could've done it cheaper myself with other providers, and had to strongly argue that the alternative (Dyn, Google Cloud, AWS etc.) is a pragmatic and possibly the best albeit expensive choice in the long-run.

What are you going to do for DNS? I just got static DNS for home so I guess I could host my own DNS but the custom gapps domain mail will be a hassle. Maybe just forward it to my other @gmail account?

Luckily I never trusted this to stay free (for all 10 years I think), so I never used the calendar or drive, just the email.

Next step is buying IP space, that's a lot more expensive with the yearly AS fees, I'm not sure I can afford that, and ARIN/RIPE seem just as bad as the [PS]aaS cartel where if you don't pay up your IP space gets re-sold.

Granted, we don't have chargebacks everyday, but we get some occasionals one that, at these price, would hurt way more.

Now, we still offer an alternative plan that is available only upon request (or on certain occasions). We call it the "Lite plan" at 30$ per year, where you have all the advantages of the premium plan, but without the SMTP sending part. If that interests you, just send a request to the support and we'll enable it for your account :=)

Every couple of years I get a new trial account with them as I liked it so much, and each time I think 'nothing has really changed'. I read their dev blog and it's interesting, and their staff were great each time, but it just seems to take forever for anything to get done.

It may have been finished now, but the last time I tried them (only maybe a year or two ago) I was put off by wanting to move my calendar entries over and finding out that the new(ish) CalDav support they'd added had no web interface to it.

I get that the basics don't really change (and they are good at it); I just get irritated at the lack of pace. Otherwise I'd definitely consider returning to them.

What the 25 aliases allotted in the free tier allows you to do is have 25 different domains.

Happy to answer any questions that you might need!

Our decision was to not use STARTTLS for port 25, but that's maybe not a good idea and we should allow it back: this would make both services happier ;)

In a nutshell: TLS via 465 works correctly, and STARTTLS via 587 too.

Don't hesitate if you want to weight on this, happy to discuss this further!

Well I'm very annoyed. It's not that I might have to pay for a service, it's the unfairness of it. I've several friends and family members up with accounts on my domain to be nice to them to make life easier for them or because they were too poor/techy to set up something for themselves.

I also have a few hacky things set up using free email accounts on my domain, because why not.

Now Google want to charge me cash for their accounts after I've done some free marketing for them in getting people using the Google ecosystem. They don't seem to be providing me with any help to get them transferred to a free account. It will cost me either a lot of money or time and/or social capital to solve this.

This is an enormous price jump from free. The free Google Apps or whatever it is had up to 100 users. If I had 100 users, that looks like £50 per user per year on their cheapest tier, so £500 [edit: £5,000!! - thanks, @alias_neo] a year.

I don't know what their freeloader costs are on the grandfathered Google domain accounts, but I'm having a hard time believing it's going to be worth the amount of goodwill they're going to burn by shitting on their most loyal users of all. These folks have been using Google services (and presumably suggesting as much to others) for at least 10 years.

But I'm not paying $100/mo so my extended family can continue to have a vanity Google account.

Google ought to think long and hard about this one. The email I draft to everyone to tell them that they're losing access to all their email, docs, pictures, apps, music, etc. is going to be harsh as hell on Google. And I'm sure that I'm not the only one that's going to have to author one of those...

Based mostly on taking display ads from "only in the sidebar" to "everywhere, including every pixel above the fold if the search term is lucrative". There's not a lot of juice left there to continue revenue increases that exceed general internet eyeball growth. They will still make an insane amount of money, but I don't see how they can sustain past growth YoY percentages.

The thing that was the most annoying was the shift from G Suite to Workplace. Before, I was getting unlimited Google Drive storage for $12 a month, and now it is like $20 or something... still, for $20 a month you get basically unlimited cloud storage. No other provider can compete.

GCP is number 3 and struggling, with few wins big enough to compensate for the gaps. Workspaces isn’t bad but it’s not compellingly better than O365. Both are held back by management and sales teams who appear to think it’s 2008 and everyone will do the job of selling for them.

At least your local heroin vendor doesn't pretend it's /always/ going to be free, though...

I have a dozen or so family members on mine, that's ~£600.

Using G-Suite as your personal email has always been hell anyway.

In these comments (on HN), I've seen claims that we'll still be able to login to Google with our old accounts, like how it's possible to have a Google account with an @yahoo login.

I've also seen people disputing that, though.

> Using G-Suite as your personal email has always been hell anyway.

I've not had "hell"-level problems. It's all been working pretty well for me.

I would gladly transition to a @gmail.com account and just do an email forward, which is why I had originally signed up, IF ONLY GOOGLE WOULD HAVE A MIGRATION TOOL. They pushed my family into Workspace as they abandoned us, and give us NO OPTION to transfer 13+ years of history.

I dont really need any more service than I have now, I don't need the full google workspace, I just want gmail on my custom domain, thats all really.

The most annoying parts of this, google, the company that hosts my email, couldn't even be bothered to send me an email about this, I instead found out about it on the front page of HN.

So now I need to figure out how to migrate out, because if I move my email, I have to move my entire google account, my email, domain hosting/registration, youtube account, everything, I have no way to port the data over even to a regular account.

Plus, what about all the third party web sites that offer nice buttons that say "Sign in with Google"?

If you used your legacy Gapps domain to authenticate, do you think they all provide easy implementations to migrate your Google-one-click-authentication account to a same-email-new-local-password account? Hell no.

If such a service only saved the email address when the user account was created it might be very difficult for them to fix this unless the do it really quickly and I happen to sign in to their service before all of this goes down.

It's honestly just a chore, many things don't work using G-Suite accounts, like taking part of a Google Home family with Gmail users, or signing in to Android Automotive (yes, I had to make a new account to be able to sign in to my Polestar 2 because my account is a G-Suite account), I would be HAPPY if they "downgraded" me to Gmail with custom domains and charged me a few bucks a month for it.

If Google introduced a "Legacy GSuite Mail' plan at say $20/yr to retain all existing mail functionality and accounts, and disabled every other Workspace feature, I'd gladly pay for that.

I could almost be sympathetic to them not wanting to build a migration tool.

But the least they could have done is set up a way to permanently forward to another gmail account so at least old email addresses do not break. They did not do that.

Ooh, and one more super fun fact: there is no way to transfer ownership of a Google Drive folder to an account outside of your domain. Which is awesome when you're the owner of a large shared folder that needs to persist.

Not to mention Android devices and software purchases tied to the account, what happens to those unless Google provides a migration tool?

When you cancel workspace, the accounts remain active but lose access to just the workspace features (gmail, drive, docs, calendar etc). The accounts will remain the same for things like google play, youtube etc and you won't lose access to any purchases.

The biggest impact I can see, other than the headache of migration, is that former GFYD email address can NEVER be used for docs, drive etc, even on the same terms as a free personal account.

And still, losing google docs document sharing, and calendar, on the e-mail address identifier which will stay my valid and primary one is a hostile move, plain and simple.

The situation has been officially confirmed on their support pages [https://support.google.com/a/answer/1257646]:

" Impact to services after you cancel Google Workspace You lose access to core Google Workspace services, such as Gmail, Calendar, Meet, and more. You still have access to Additional Google services, such as YouTube, Google Photos, and Google Ads. "

"Support availability is rolling out to our G Suite legacy free edition customers over the coming days. If you do not currently have access to Support, please check back in a few days. We apologize for any inconvenience, but look forward to connecting with you shortly."

I look forward to some support for the service I've used for 15 years and what to tell the 5 family members who use "G Suite" (aka Google Apps) to handle email from my domain.

Do you know if there's a list of which services will/won't be avaiable after this process? Seems a bit random. Google ads but not gmail..but you can use gmail to point at another email service presumably? Can I still use the google apps I paid for? Does my [email protected] sort of work like it would if I'd use a hotmain account as my android account? But...if I did that, wouldn't I have access to gmail still? I sort of assumed you would but perhaps not.

One thing about G Suite accounts is Google never got around to making them act just like normal accounts; I cannot review android apps with my account, nor can I share paid-for apps with family members. Will this functionality magically appear after I cancel?

You can sign up for a google account with any email address, so if you'd never used GFYD you'd be able to do this no problem.

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.

> (Optional) Step 3: Delete your organization’s Google Account

> If you no longer want a Google Account for your organization, delete the entire account. Deleting your organization’s account frees your domain within 24 hours for use with a new Google Account.

Not totally sure the implications of that, it kind of sounds like you can create a clean slate where you can re-use that email address as normal? But not sure, it's confusing and I wouldn't count on it.

Which I'm not surprised about not being sure what will happen -- honestly for the last ten years, the implications and consequences of this legacy free "g suite"/"g aps"/whatever it is account have been continually super confusing and un-documented, and often seemed accidental on google's end.

Uh oh. So, let's say I take my custom domain email address and set it up on a non-Google provider. (The whole reason I have a custom domain is to avoid locking me to a vendor).

I can't then set up an ordinary personal google account using this email, it'll be reserved forever?

That stinks.

If the legacy product is the same as the paid product, you may want to rename your accounts/switch domains before you close the workspace. Then there wouldn't be a naming conflict.

And still, losing google docs document sharing, and calendar, on the e-mail address identifier which will stay my valid and primary one is a hostile move, plain and simple.

HUP gets you Microsoft 365 (Office apps, OneDrive, ad-free email with a 50GB quota and one custom domain) for your family, with 30% off list price for people using Microsoft solutions at work — which is most office workers, assuming their employers have opted in.

It’d be nice to see something similar from Google.

Just tested a bit and it looks like only domains with DNS hosted by Godaddy work with this.

The process is a little convoluted: https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/ft15pk/use_perso...

Sounds like a perfect opportunity for a 20% time project. Surely you aren't the only Googler in this situation?

but the venn diagram overlap of people

    * willing to pay for such a tool, 
    * not having switched to another provider since
    * and not willing to start paying for it now

The cost of the domain name is $10 per domain per year or $1 per person per year little enough for one person to pay without thinking.

Most people keep an email address for a very very long time rarely switching unless a service ceases to exist.

Almost no domain owners are going to pony up $720 per year themselves and collection from other users will be an untenable hassle.

Basically every bullet point you listed is wrong. The remaining pool of users is likely 99% vanity users who would have used Gmail+custom domain forever at no real cost to Google over free Gmail none of which will migrate to Google workspace.

For Google the gain from this change will be identical to picking n random Gmail accounts and canceling them and keeping those users digital purchases as a giant fu.

Not ruinous but hardly profitable either.

Someone with an ounce of sense would have included the option to migrate all email accounts to regular Gmail accounts.

Eventually unlimited free accounts was dropped to 50, in 2009 (my grandfathered account was soft-capped at that, with the option to reach out to support to increase it), but I had several other domains that were hard-capped at 50 since I opened them after that limit was instituted. [1]

Then that limit was dropped from 50 to 10 (hard capped, grand-fathered accounts kept their old limits) in 2011. [2]

Then last but not least there was the 1 user free if you had a Google AppEngine project (that came with the requirement that it was tied to a G-Suite at the time).

My G Suite legacy accounts were all created in 2007-2010 timeframe.

[1]: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2009/01/50-user-limi...

[2]: https://cloud.googleblog.com/2011/04/helping-small-businesse...

Mine is from '08 and I have heard no official communications from them.

I use it as a forwarder to my gmail, but now I have to migrate my parents off their accounts. It will either end up as Gmail or Outlook.com for them. Migrating their email will be annoying.

I maintain a full GSuite Business account for other purposes, so I can use that as my mail relay service.

Thanks to routing rules, they'll continue to receive emails transparently, it will redirect a copy to their new email, as if they were a BCC.

I'll handle the groups the same, only a few and the routing rule can add 100 recipients.

Eventually, once cloudflare email forwarding supports groups, I'll just move to that. It's on their internal roadmap, so maybe it will happen before 2024.

I dont think they can/will do it for anyone prior to December of 2011.

http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2006/08/google-launches-host...

"A standard edition of Google Apps for Your Domain is available today as a beta product without cost to domain administrators or end users. Key features include 2 gigabytes of email storage for each user, easy to use customization tools, and help for administrators via email or an online help center. Furthermore, organizations that sign up during the beta period will not ever have to pay for users accepted during that period (provided Google continues to offer the service)."

The original version of the TOS from August 2006 read as follows:

https://web.archive.org/web/20061029132431/https://www.googl...

"16. Modification. Except as provided in Section 17, Google reserves the right to change or modify any of the terms and conditions contained in this Agreement or any policy governing Google Apps, at any time, by posting the new agreement at http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/terms.html or such URL as Google may provide. Customer is responsible for regularly reviewing any updates to this Agreement. Any changes or modifications to this Agreement will become binding (i) when made in a writing executed by both parties, (ii) by Customer's online acceptance of updated terms, or (iii) after Customer's continued use of Google Apps after such terms have been updated by Google."

"17. No Fees. Provided that Google continues to offer Google Apps for Your Domain to Customer, Google will continue to provide a version of Google Apps for Your Domain (with substantially the same services as those provided as of the Effective Date) free of charge to Customer; provided that such commitment (i) applies only to End User Accounts created during the period when the Google Hosted Services are considered a beta service (the "Beta Period") by Google (such Beta Period determination at Google's sole discretion) and (ii) may not apply to new opt-in services added by Google to the Google Apps for Your Domain in the future. For sake of clarity, Google reserves the right to offer a premium version of Google Apps for Your Domain for a fee."

In mid 2007 the language was changed to read the following:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070407174217/http://www.google...

"17. Modification. Except as provided in Section 18, Google reserves the right to change or modify any of the terms and conditions contained in this Agreement or any policy governing the Service, at any time, by posting the new agreement at http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/terms.html or such URL as Google may provide. Customer is responsible for regularly reviewing any updates to this Agreement. Any changes or modifications to this Agreement will become binding (i) when made in a writing executed by both parties, (ii) by Customer's online acceptance of updated terms, or (iii) after Customer's continued use of the Service after such terms have been updated by Google."

"18. Fees. Provided that Google continues to offer the Service to Customer, Google will continue to provide a version of the Service (with substantially the same services as those provided as of the Effective Date) free of charge to Customer; provided that such commitment: (i) does not apply to the Domain Service described in Section 4 above; and (ii) may not apply to new opt-in services added by Google to the Service in the future. For sake of clarity, Google reserves the right to offer a premium version of the Service for a fee."

This version was persisting thru at least March of 2011:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110330181415/http://www.google...

However by December of 2011, that language was gone:

https://web.archive.org/web/20111231230542/http://www.google...

Worst case, I may end up paying for a month or two while I make the transition.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's finally time to migrate away, I've been putting it off, but so far the accounts I created seem to have mostly become dormant, so only one user has to change, and I'll just re-create them an IMAP account for their mail, they don't use any other services.

Why do any of your issues in any way contribute to the decision wherever someone should invest their time to create a migration tool so users can switch from the old legacy product to a free account which doesn't have any of the domain features to begin with?

I get that you're unhappy that Google discontinues their free service for you, but that wasn't what the discussion was about.

All users who signed up for google apps at your domain are in A people who initially signed up. People in B are those who haven't switched away. C are those who are unwilling to pay $72 per user per year.

A->B Very few users change email addresses very frequently because we accumulate 100 or even hundreds of pages with signups under a single address, phones set up under our google account, oauth sign ins, apps and games purchased under our google account. Google accounts are much more sticky than regular email accounts and people rarely abandon those. I would venture to guess the list of active accounts in B is most of A.

B->C Very few people who signed up for $10 a year for 10-50 addresses are going to be onboard with paying between $720 and $3600 a year. C includes 99.9% of B.

I have at least a dozen relatives on my Google family domain. We're looking at a lifetime cost of tens of thousands of dollars if I were to switch to Workspace, which is a non-starter.

One possibility is to finally incorporate my family foundation as a 501(c)3, if we can do that in time. It's been on my to do list.

I'm not even sure where to go from here, but I have things like Android apps I've bought on this account, as does my family. Or I guess the word is "rented." I have a bunch of logins with Google OAuth. Or I guess past tense.

I feel like there's a class action in here somewhere.

Right, but only (some) Googlers are in a position to solve the problem by applying 20% time to it.

That seems... wrong. Do you actually work at Google?

Anyone who was ever an Xoogler knows this is basically a non starter. The privacy issues alone are radioactive as far as desirability to chase.