I don't know. I agree with Google on this one. There should be more people paying for this awesome service.

And to be honest, 50 accounts is still a lot. Having 50 or so employees in a company is a fairly large company, companies with that many people can fork up $50/user/year

The question isn't really "can they" but "will they"? A lot of big companies have very cheap office deals.

The only reason Google's competitors have not been charging for these kind of services is because Google hasn't been. I imagine many competitors want Google to make this move as then it allows then to do the same and start building some much needed revenue.

My advice to Google is to lower the user threshold, possibly as low as 12-25 and create a middle-tier pricing option.

1. Bootstrapped 2. SMB 3. Enterprise

Yeah, the prices are currently:

    0-50 users: $0
    50+  users: 50 * 50 = $2500 - ouch!

For a company with 50+ employees, $2500 per year is not a major expense, relative to rent and payroll. Still vastly cheaper than MS Office.

Sure, but perhaps companies in the middle, with less than 50 employees, might be willing to spend some money, but not $50 a year per employee. Say, a 10 employee company - that's 500$ a year, which isn't huge, but not peanuts either. If Google could get 200$ out of them, and still make a profit, it seems like a win for everyone. No idea what their actual costs are, but they can't be that high if the advertising is anywhere close to covering them.

Yikes, I thought it was 0-50 for free and any users past that were $50. So 51 users would be $50/yr. I guess you really have to justify that 51st employee :).

Well, companies can upgrade well before they hit 50 users. You get extra space, no ads and premium support.

We use the paid gmail system in our office and it's the best thing that ever happened to our email infrastructure! Pretty cheap and super easy.