It's always been remarkable to me how badly Google shits on the people that are obviously its biggest boosters. I was personally responsible for multiple paid Google Workspace accounts. I can't imagine it makes financial since for them to axe the grandfathered plans. As a free service, it was bearable that my custom account was a little flaky, but there is no way I'm going to pay for a shittier version of their free product. On top of that, now I have to figure out if it's possible to transfer movie/app purchases. Thanks a fucking ton, Google.
If you cancel your workspace account, then the individual user accounts will still have access to non-workspace services [0], which importantly includes Google Play and all access to your purchases will be retained. Any other google services which aren't core apps will also work as normal.
Any former GFYD account becomes a semi-account with access to a subset of google services but not all. Since the account exists, it cannot be used to sign up for a free personal account, and you can never use google docs or have google docs shared with any former GFYD account.
Overall, this is a better resolution than I'd feared, but it seems ridiculous that being a loyal google customer for over 15 years leaves you disadvantaged.
[0] Core workspace apps: Calendar, Currently, Drive & Docs, Gmail, Chat, Meet, Groups for business, Jamboard, Keep, Sites, Tasks
OK, that's actually terrible.
Is there any way to delete the account and start fresh clean slate, so you can use that email address for an ordinary free google account that's just like any other?
The whole reason I had a custom domain was to be able to keep it even if I switched my email provider, of course. I planned to use this email address for everything forever.
Of course now I'll have split-brain because my photos are locked into the old account (trying to share and save doesn't work because Google forgets that they are supposed to be zero-rated because they came from a pixel).
I'll see if this rename works, then I can slowly migrate off of the other Google services. For services that I still want I think you can transfer YouTube accounts between Google accounts. Same with Play accounts (you need to pay but apparently you can ask for a refund for a transfer).
Reference: https://support.google.com/a/answer/1257646?product_name=Unu...
What's funny is that I would probably pay a reasonable annual cost for the service (I'm already paying an annual fee for the domain), but the way this is announced is enough to lose me as a customer, permanently.
- No links to the information in my admin.google.com panel - No personal notification at all to the billing contact - An automated "upgrade" to paying a monthly cost for a formerly free product
Yeah, no. This is borderline scammy, not the way to treat people who have been your customers for 15-20 years, and who disproportionately are responsible for spending decisions at their companies.
Any competitors to Gmail want my business and support custom domains / have a reasonable strategy for migrating data away from G Suite accounts?
I now feel that this was a favor in disguise: Google spent so many years blocking Domains accounts from new services that I never developed habits around using them. Switching away is just migrating email since they made it hard to develop any other source of inertia.
I think this is the tutorial I followed years ago: https://medium.com/@raymondgh/how-to-set-up-a-free-custom-do...
I've always used a this setup, have my personal domain forward all mail to google, and I have my address with domain set up in gmail. Also, I think that's no longer an option - I realised a while ago, I couldn't add any more...
This wasn't "blocking". IIUC the problem is that these accounts have tigher data use restrictions so a lot of Google services never bothered to support them.
For example I believe that one restriction is that data can't be used to train ML models for other users. So if a service created one big ML model it needed to exclude these accounts. Instead of doing that and an audit they often just blocked those users.
> Just looks like most of our accounts are going to get deleted or are going to have to pay $6/month for nothing.
Am I wrong or are you paying that $6/mo for having the gmail UI in front of your custom domain? Doesn't really seem like nothing.
People often react badly to bait and switch tactics.
The solution is to offer people a way to revert to a free personal account without losing access to their files, data, and digital goods they have purchased.
What they gave away for free included the promise "This will be free forever" (as linked in comments by others here).
> I don't think someone giving out free stuff owes me more?
But this isn't "more" then, is it? It's taking back what was already given.
I kind of chuckled reading this thinking about how Google even bothered to spend resources closing this legacy service. I wondered what metric they used to determine it was worth spending effort to shut this down.
Even if the cap was 1TB I imagine there is a large amount of unused but occupied hot storage that is part of the equation. Not sure what others but in general there has to be some financial sheet indicating that this is costing money and offering no value so it is time to sunset it.
To be fair I think that was per user on the domain, so probably could've created additional users to cycle through.
Main thing that was holding me back was losing the grandfathered free plan should I change my mind / find an alternative for photos (I'd quite like to keep Google docs etc), but I guess that's no longer a consideration
Hmm, almost like Google have managed to make non-Google email impossible to do (excepting a few other very large outfits like Microsoft). What a happy accident that the de-facto answer is "give all your email to the advertising company".
-Buy domain from name cheap
-Setup email forwarding to my gmail account with namecheap
-Setup gmail to optionally send as [email protected] (I forget the steps, but I think it's under settings -> accounts)
So although the email comes to/from my custom domain, gmail is the real sender so I've not had any trouble with delivery (that I've noticed, at least)
What's the alternative? Can I switch to a personal gmail and keep my personal email/domain?
For $1/month
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238
Cheaper than Google's $6/month but not free.
Same exact story, although we have been using it like this closer to 20 years now.
What we get for free is a <something>@gmail.com address and the associated services. We DON'T get [email protected] or anything like that on top of Google's infrastructure.
I can appreciate your frustration but these threads always come full circle to if you aren't paying for something you are the product and have much less control over your fate. Google's willingness to kill things is why I avoid coupling things like that to them.
As I understood it, that -- [email protected] or something like that on top of Google's infrastructure -- was exactly what GFYD users were supposed to get for free. Forever, according to Google's original promises.
Ideally I'd like to have some self-hosted solution though - will be looking at options...
My example is Google Play Music, which they migrated to Youtube Music. They probably offered to merge accounts at the time, I don't remember, but I ended up with two Youtube accounts with different playlists that I couldn't merge or transfer data easily. I had to do an annoying dance to recreate my playlists from one account in the other.
The problem is Google Docs which you have shared with many people, Google Photos which has zero rated all my Pixel uploads and will become crazy expensive if manually migrated to a new account. My YouTube channels are tied to this account and a couple of Android Apps.
Calendar is maybe slightly difficult to move. But Email contacts and calendar aren't the problem. In general the problem isn't actually the "Workspace Core Services" that have the lock in. Somewhat funny because they are the ones going away. It is all of the other services attached to the Google account that don't have a migration path like Webmaster and Postmaster tools and Play purchases.
Did google do something different with these accounts? I didn’t even think they offered a registrar service when they stopped letting you register free custom domain gmails accounts.
16 years ago me and my friends signed up for "GMail for your domain". That's it. We wanted to use GMail, which was by far the best email available at the time, and have email addresses at our own domain instead of @gmail.com. That's it.
Since that time several of us have been using our GFYD/GSuite/Workspaces accounts as our primary Google accounts. We're not a business. We don't use any business features. We just use them as our personal Google accounts. We use them for YouTube, Photos, everything. Our entire digital identities are bound to these accounts.
Yet, over the years, these accounts are just worse than free personal Google accounts. Because we are not a business, there is absolutely no benefit to these accounts whatsoever other than the custom domain. In fact, we can't even use the new version of Google Pay. It only works with free accounts! We all had to switch to other payment platforms to split bills. Ironically, we'll have to use one of those non-Google platforms to split the Google Workspaces bill as well.
And now we're being forced to pay for something that everyone else gets for free. I'd be less angry if we got some kind of benefit above and beyond normal free Google accounts. I'd be less angry if the price wasn't a ridiculous per-user rate. I'd be less angry if we weren't forced into this against our will. This is not what we signed up for 16 years ago. I'd be less angry if they offered some way to escape. Let use merge/transition our accounts with personal Google accounts. Let us have personal accounts with custom domain, iCloud offers that feature now.
Nope. Just looks like most of our accounts are going to get deleted or are going to have to pay $6/month for nothing.