I mean, I’m annoyed sure but I’ve gotten over a decade of free service. When I saw the announcement for a half second considered setting up an email server again then remembered what a massive pain in the ass that use to be and just going to pay the fee

I'm getting precisely one value added service over a regular google account - a custom domain.

I dont need any of the other workspace related frippery, I don't want it, it makes some of the features of the account harder to use - it was better before it had the notion of an organization even.

I just want to be able to create some gmail accounts under my domain, I'm not a business, I'm a guy who handed out email accounts to his friends, now I gotta figure out if any of them are using them still.

Same thing here. Within the past two years I started a transition to a regular Google Account b/c GApps Free was a second class citizen (no family groups, etc.)

Killing the free tier now is a huge PITA, and especially aggravating without them implementing any way to carry over licenses to a regular google account which is still free.

Same here, its the domain I care about. Its my fiancees last name in our countries TLD. Here name is really short and nice, so it has been awesome. This is a bummer, since her sister and fiancee are also using it. Thank god I have not been using it for more than an email alias, and the kids too.

This is very troublesome... It is possible to create a general, personal Google account using any email address (iirc) so I wonder if it is possible to just migrate to your own email solution (since you own the domain) and keep the google account, or at least migrate it to a regular account.

It appears this is not possible. I don’t need any of the G Suite features, and I don’t even need email. I just need my single user inside G Suite to be converted to a normal unmanaged Google account but there doesn’t seem to be a way to do that.

Some people are saying if you convert your account to Google workspace then cancel that then you end up with what you want. You'd keep Photos and YouTube but no Gmail, contacts, calendar etc. I'm trying to discover if this is true.

I would still need Docs, which is “core”.

I don't really understand. Why, when leaving G suite and going back to a normal account, would you not have access to stuff like Docs, Gmail etc? It's like you're being punished, rather than simply not having extra features.

FYI this doesn't actually seem to be the case... quoting from my other comment in a different thread:

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.

That's one reason why I have tried to only buy things on my personal Gmail account (@gmail.com), a few times I forgot and bought things on my private domain.

"paid for"?

The paid Android apps, YouTube purchases, etc which the parent commenter bought using his account. If it was just email hosting (the GSuite service itself), it wouldn't be such a big deal.

I misunderstood. Thank you for the clarification.