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!
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.