100% this... there is a product definition and the free bring your own domain model is not part of the free product definition any more. I'm having trouble understanding how technically literate people are grumpy about this. It was only a matter of time. Google is a business, not your friend and you should treat interaction with them in this lens. It's not 2002 when Google was the cool hip thing to use and they seemed to demonstrate the do no evil mantra. It's a publicly trading business, one of the largest in world by revenue and market position and financial tactical decisions will trump your feelings for what you think they owe you.

> 100% this... there is a product definition and the free bring your own domain model is not part of the free product definition any more. I'm having trouble understanding how technically literate people are grumpy about this.

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.

How is ten years of free a bait and switch? Free is free and when things are free the giver of free stuff owes you nothing beyond what was already given for free. It may suck but I don't think someone giving out free stuff owes me more?

> the giver of free stuff owes you nothing beyond what was already given for free.

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.

People got a decade or more of free email hosting from Google and now need to pay for it. I know one small business that sells physical products and got 200 free accounts through this program. To this day they never delete old employees accounts as a result because it had zero cost to them to keep it around (not that they cared about security).

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.

I recall at one point they were offering large (unlimited) storage quotas for these business accounts. Some groups were using rclone to interface for Google Drive to store warez and other large ticket items like pirated audio/video.

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.

I wish mine had 1tb - I was already considering paying as I'm forever bumping up against a ~20gb limit with Google photos contributing most.

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

That's what I'm doing. I wanted a vanity domain, but didn't want to deal with email server BS so I got a Google Workspace. The 1TB of cloud storage helps too.

Regular gmail supports pop for this. I set up the email accounts on my web host, and then put the credentials into gmail.

You can have this exact thing cheaper if you set up a server and forward your mail to Gmail. And you'll also have a server to host a website or whatever else.

Back in 2010 this was reasonable. Now? Anti-spam functions have become quite the specialty, with DNS and email strongly intertwined. And that's all on top of the already significant burdens to run a non-relay hacker-proof server. There's a lot going on to operate reliable basic services on the Internet today.

> Anti-spam functions have become quite the specialty, with DNS and email strongly intertwined.

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".

This is true. I tried forwarding email going to my domain to Gmail, but it keeps getting flagged as spam despite setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC. I ended up just setting up a filter to never send email addressed to @mydomain.com as spam and hope SpamAssassin catches most spam before Postfix forwards it.

IIRC you can send your outgoing mail through google too. But I'm not sure — I haven't set up the outgoing part in any way so I can only receive mail on my domain but not send.

Most things are cheaper if you do them yourself. I'm not sure that is much of an argument against what Google is doing.

Isn't it a pain to avoid getting your outgoing emails marked as spam, if you aren't using one of the established providers (google, microsoft, fastmail etc)?

So, what I did for a similar use case:

-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)

I'm planning a similar setup. Cloudflare now as email forwarding in beta and then use my personal Gmail account to send mail as by custom domain. Here's a tutorial on setting up Gmail's "Send Mail As": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEheS8gM4Xs

I've had issues with Outlook (or whatever Microsoft calls their mail service) placing my emails in the spam folder, so YMMW. Works fine when the receiver is using Gmail, though.

Oh cool, didn't realize that last step was possible with free gmail.