Like millions of people, I had a free Google Apps account for my family. I upgraded it to a paid Google Workspace when the free tier was terminated by Google because my dad actually uses it for some work features.

I can’t purchase any Google consumer products now, because this “family” account is now an “enterprise” and… there’s just no way. It can’t be done. No. Just… go away. Shoo…

I can’t get a YouTube “family” account.

I can’t get an Antigravity personal account.

Nothing works.

Google insists that I upgrade the be the entire organisation, or nothing.

It’s doubly stupid because like millions of people, I initial subscribed as a non-business and was forced to convert by Google!

Yep. I have to maintain a separate consumer gmail/google account for this exact reason. I end up paying for some things twice, such as Google Photos since I want those photos synced to my "enterprise" account. I've had this thing, like you, since it was free and somehow I'm now paying nearly $30/month for two people to have Email and storage for that email.

Meanwhile, Microsoft allows enterprise accounts to purchase products for only a subset of their accounts instead of big-bang upgrading the "entire org".

With Microsoft, an org can mix and match E3, E5, or E7 licensing tiers on a per-user basis. Which makes sense, because not every employee is "the same"! This is just obvious if you stop and think about for more than a fraction of a second. As a random example, I work with an org in "transport". Their backoffice staff have a bunch of advanced cloud app licenses, their bus drivers do not, because their job isn't sitting in front of a PC all day!

Google. Just. Doesn't. Get. This.

It's all-or-nothing.

Upgrade the entire org, or nobody gets AI.

You absolutely can mix Google Workspace licences but you either need to go via the Google sales team or via an Google services partner.

And to be honest, I understand the reasoning, Google Workspace is supposed to be simpler to operate in comparison to Microsoft 365, and simple means a single licencing choice.

If you're at the scale where you need to worry about mixing and matching licences, you're at the scale where you should be looking at either an enterprise contract or going through a partner, otherwise you're going to be paying list price.

It sucks for people who can handle the complexity, but also as someone who has spent far too time in Microsoft licencing conversations and contract talks, Microsoft licencing is painfully complex (some licencing is across the whole tenant, some spend is consumption based billing against Azure, some licencing is requires a minimum amount against a %age of your total M365 user base, and then don't get me started on licencing machine users or multiplexing).

It sounds like you’re a Google employee making excuses for what I consider abject failure to implement “advanced features” like… a drop-down list… per user instead of per org.

Partners or resellers have no reason to exist as a part of this trivial database design concern.

It’s a category error of the highest order to assume that only “largest enterprises” want or need per-user product licensing control. If anything, it’s the smallest orgs that need to be frugal at this level of granularity.

The relatively high cost of AI subscriptions just makes this error much more obvious, impossible to ignore or pretend is “actually better somehow”.

Because, you know, everyone would rather pay $200/mo so that even their gardener and the bus driver has an “Ultra” AI subscription than spend even ten minutes in a web portal assigning that license only to the sole developer on the payroll!

This is how it looks on the marketing pages not in real world.

For example: what is "Antigravity Entitlement"? You can buy whatever subscription (even Ultra or higher) you like and not have access to Antigravity at all. You will have to then go through some nebulous verification process which half the time is just broken. E.g. people in EU were for months blocked from verification by the Google app insisting they message a RCE number in US unreachable from EU carriers.

Then you have to consider what is the potential fallout of Google deciding you did some hacking or said to AI something politically incorrect and banning your entire account and all connected accounts.

If you have anything important on Google you need to first degoogle before considering using their AI services or you're playing with fire.