Why migrate to Fastmail for $5/user, if one can keep their installation of G Suite for $6/user?

1) You can stop feeding personal data into the Google (advertisement) ecosystem

2) Google is notorious for killing off services or changing their agreements at a moments notice like here so there is a chance they'll drop their offering or increase prices.

3) Google support is either terrible or nonexistent (unless you're lucky enough to get your complaint to the HN frontpage).

I'm an affected user and I plan to put in the effort to migrate -- I only use it for email on a custom domain and have been doing regular backups (using gmvault) in case Google changed their mind so moving to a new service should be a breeze.

1) Business accounts aren't used for advertising.

2) Not paid business accounts.

3) Not for paid business accounts.

For 20 years people have complained of 1,2,3 for free accounts, and said that they'd prefer to pay to avoid these issues. Now that there's an option....

https://workspace.google.com/learn-more/security/security-wh...

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Our philosophy Google Workspace customers own their customer data, not Google. Customer data that Google Workspace organizations put into our systems is theirs, and we do not scan it for advertisements. We offer our customers a detailed Data Processing Amendment that describes our commitment to protecting customer data. Furthermore, if customers delete their data, we commit to deleting it from our systems within 180 days.

No advertising in Google Workspace There is no advertising in the Google Workspace Core Services, and we have no plans to change this in the future. Google does not collect, scan or use data in Google Workspace Core Services for advertising purposes. Customer administrators can restrict access to Non-Core Services from the Google Workspace Admin console. Google indexes customer data to provide beneficial services, such as spam filtering, virus detection, spellcheck and the ability to search for emails and files within an individual account.

Limited data use

Google does not use any of your data for any purpose except to provide you with the relevant Google Workspace service. For example, when customers use the Cloud Translation API, Google will not make the content of the text that you send available to the public, or share it with anyone else, except as necessary to provide the Cloud Translation API service.

1) valid point, but how can I be sure another email provider won't do just the same, or even worse? At least Google is sitting on it's data using it to profit for itself. Smaller actors are just wholesaling everything they can reach.

2) I don't agree with "moments notice" sentiment. 3 months are quite enough for most users (and they can buy more time for a relatively small price). The free lunch was off the menu for more than nine years, I am actually surprised they gave us so much time.

3) There are replies around this post that for paying users Google support is significantly better. Good opportunity to check if it is really so.

Because the other service only does email as a service, so if they do the same their business folds, and the other service is likely to have far better support (which tends to 0 at google)

It is far more likely Google will decide to change the terms unilaterally on their customers or discontinue a service altogether - their business is advertising, not email.

Yeah I'm happy with fastmail and it just makes it less confusing when I'm doing stuff online. Instead of having 2 google accounts, one legacy and one custom domain. My custom domain is a completely different site unattached to the entire google ecosystem.

I already deal with this enough at work. I don't like having to switch between g accounts all the time.

+1 for FastMail, been a happy user for a while.

Fastmail discounts for longer terms. I'm on the 30GB plan because of a custom domain and it was $90 for 2 years in Nov 2021, or $3.75/mo. Now I see it's $95 for 2 years so they've had a recent price increase apparently.

Fastmail does give you access to your 30GB via FTP or WebDAV. It also has a web-based file uploading tool. Then you can create links to share files or folders with others, like a picture album. I did this a little just to try it out, and it was very straightforward. Whereas I could never figure out how to do it with iCloud and gave up.

Fastmail looks great, thanks for the recommendation.

And I see they support custom domains too:

https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360058753394-Cus...

Ticks all our boxes (admittedly our needs are very basic).

I switched from gmail to Fastmail a couple of years ago and the gmail import worked really well, too!

This is a really helpful tip, thanks!

Does Fastmail do mailing lists? That's the one thing I use in GSuite other than the basic email.

We do, but it's a separate product: https://www.topicbox.com/

I love that you guys are monitoring this :-)

Does Google support ever reply???!

I think they have always replied to me (as a paying customer). Now, whether their reply has any relevance to the question I asked, let alone solves my problem, is another issue entirely. I have at times wondered if they just have a random reply generator that doesn't look at anything except the subject line of the request.

Not unless you work for google.

They also take action if you can get your question/complaint to the HN frontpage..

Rarely if ever, AFAIK.