Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2012/12/changes-to-google-apps-for-businesses.html

by antichaos • 14 years ago

626 453 14 years ago

googleenterprise.blogspot.com

revelation• 14 years ago

Not sure how to feel about this. The core feature of the free Google Apps was that you could use GMail with your own domain without having to run a dedicated mail server yourself.

pyre4• 14 years ago

Maybe this will drive alternatives that are cheaper than $50 per user per year.

ericleeclark• 14 years ago

Any cheaper than $50 per user per year and you're in the free range. Just to keep this in perspective, $50 a year is a pretty good value when you think about what you're getting in Google Apps.

justincormack2• 14 years ago

And? You want this to be free? It clearly costs money.

nuclear_eclipse• 14 years ago

I see ads on my free google apps account...

burke3• 14 years ago

How so? It's essentially the same service as gmail, only with a different domain. The incremental cost to them is zero, and they make the same revenue as they do from a gmail user.

natrius3• 14 years ago

Plenty of services will let you forward your mail to a normal GMail account. Without an SMTP server, your GMail account will still be visible to your recipients, but it's not so bad.

indiecore12• 14 years ago

Yes I'm sure people will appreciate getting email back from <stupid_username_because_they_were_all_taken_234234>@gmail.com

pippy• 14 years ago

This could be a good thing. If you approach your manager wanting to switch from dedicated to cloud email service, and you tell him it's for free, he's going to be suspicious. If there's a cost involved - no matter how small - it gives the product a degree liability for support.

bruceboughton• 14 years ago

You could always pay for Google Apps if you wanted to, as I suspect most >5 person business do.

modeless3• 14 years ago

You can still use GMail with any domain: http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

This method is actually far more convenient than setting up Google Apps. You can both send and receive mail at the other domain, and you get a unified inbox (which Google Apps never provided).

agwa• 14 years ago

No, that method requires that the other domain have its own mail server to accept and store the mail until gmail comes and fetches it with POP. Who will host that other server?

Google Apps for domains lets you point your domain's MX record directly at Google, and Google accepts the mail for you.

antihero5• 14 years ago

Yet this doesn't appear to be any sort of mail-hosting thing, so you'd still have to sort out mail with an entirely different provider to receive e-mails on your domain. This is pretty awful.

robertpateii• 14 years ago

I didn't know about this, but it's all I wanted google apps for anyway.

I can attest it takes about 5 minutes to setup if you already have web space somewhere and know how to access its email server details.

chrisblackwell3• 14 years ago

This is really a logical step. If you are an individual and don't really see the value in $50 a year, you can forward your own domain to your regular Gmail account and set the reply to email address to whatever you want.

If you run a business and need the Google Apps platform, then $50 a year really shouldn't be a barrier for you. If it is, time to rethink your business priorities.

aidos• 14 years ago

$50 / user / year - still not insane but I know it's put people off in the past.

toomuchtodo5• 14 years ago

We have a Google Apps account at my day gig with 79 users; I pay it monthly on a credit card, at $5/month, so right around $400/month. That is incredible value for what we get with Google Apps, as they don't just do our email, calendar, etc, but also Drive and our authentication (via OAuth/LDAP).

Margh3• 14 years ago

Certainly puts me off. $5/10 per user per year, wouldn't think twice about it (even though the money would be paid grudgingly). With the number of users we have that would end up being around $50/year; but $500/year to host some email and store spreadsheets? No thanks.

darkhorn2• 14 years ago

And you don't need to forward. You can access it with IMAP within Gmail.

ampersandy2• 14 years ago

Why hasn't Google offered an option to increase from the default 25GB of email storage? Drive has an option to increase upto 16TB, but Gmail is locked at 25GB? What gives?

cllns• 14 years ago

I would like to see a breakdown (from google) of how much storage people use. I'd guess a majority use <1 GB, and I can't imagine many people need more than 25GB.

ampersandy2• 14 years ago

My comment is aimed at business users, not casual users. Several friends of mine have hit the cap with their business accounts and have had to consider alternative email providers because now they can't use their email accounts.

cdcarter• 14 years ago

They used to offer it. I'm still grandfathered on a 30GB plan, which is wonderful. I occasionally get poke emails from Google asking me to upgrade to one of the new plans.

therealarmen• 14 years ago

Please note this change has no impact on our existing customers, including those using the free version.

I give it six months before they start strong-arming free users into paid accounts.

joahua• 14 years ago

It's been nearly six years of free. That's pretty gradual strong-arming.

Note that per user limits continue to apply, so people have as much incentive as they ever did to upgrade, plus for any new domains/projects people will naturally either migrate to other options (then consolidate services around these, moving themselves off Google) or start paying.

Not convinced there's any need for hostility on either side.

loceng4• 14 years ago

This is to kill the competition; At minimum to gain a competitive advantage.

sharkweek• 14 years ago

Doubtful, plenty of people would jump on the chance to create a competitor, especially since they could market it as a cheaper (or free) alternative.

froo• 14 years ago

I'm curious what happens with the people that are in limbo - that is still in their 30 day trial period and are unable to downgrade to a free version because of that.

nosecreek2• 14 years ago

Me too. I just set up a client's email with Google Apps a couple of days ago intending to use the free version. Its going to be a big headache if they can't use the free offering.

antihero5• 14 years ago

I use it for a small activist group that I help run. There's just no way we'd have the budget for it.

Steveism2• 14 years ago

This is unfortunate indeed. The free Google Apps offering was a substantial value. What viable alternatives are there?

lwat2• 14 years ago

You could pay for it?

Steveism2• 14 years ago

Well, obviously yes I could and so could my clients. But Free is the best kind of price, especially for startups. I have no problem paying for good software and services. I also have no problem seeking out the next option that compares in value. At this point Google Apps is a paid email option that must compete with all the other countless premium email options.

pyre4• 14 years ago

For free? Probably nothing.

michael_michael• 14 years ago

How about alternatives between free and $50/user a year?

dotBen3• 14 years ago

"Google Apps offering was a substantial value"

...yet you are not prepared to pay financially in exchange for that value, and even convey disappointment when the free provision of that value is ceased.

blowing your comment out of context, but this misalignment with value and $ spend is a huge problem in our industry today.

sabat• 14 years ago

It's just too goddamned much money for organizations that are small and are not funded startups. $50 per user per year -- if it was $5, they might have a deal, but having to cough up $500 annually for something that was originally free?

ericcumbee• 14 years ago

Rackspace has Hosted email for 2 dollars per month per user. but then there is also a 10 dollar a month minimum.

facorreia• 14 years ago

For small projects, I'll take a look at Namecheap email hosting, from $2.99/year:

http://www.namecheap.com/email/email-hosting.aspx

fakeer3• 14 years ago

I am already using this for my security email address (the one that I use to secure other security doors). It's good. I think I could use it more at a even at some more cost, maybe even for my other emails, iff they better their web interface.

benaiah5• 14 years ago

Outlook.com has a free service that does precisely the same thing: http://domains.live.com

shuzchen3• 14 years ago

Seems most of the people recommending alternatives are only thinking of email. I use gapps for my family, and we take a huge advantage of having a domain-specific calender and docs.

fakeer3• 14 years ago

Chat is another service that is being ignored here.Which needs the other party to be using it.

galactus• 14 years ago

What is the advantage of using domain-specific calendar/docs over using them with your personal google account?

dotBen3• 14 years ago

Contrarian view...

by offering <50 email accounts for free, Google essentially destroyed the market for any other startups or companies to come into the market and offer non-enterprise B2B email services... thus limiting competition and innovation.

One could argue that the removal of the free tier at this point is simply because they've created an entrenched position, but one could also suggest that this creates a modicum of opportunity for another player to try to enter this space.

Certainly until today the $ size of the addressable market in the small business email space was practically $0 given Google's position.

[discuss :)]

dbuxton• 14 years ago

Still, $50/user/year doesn't give you that much room for manoeuvre as a startup...

burke3• 14 years ago

If someone's already committed to paying, they can be convinced to pay more. It's hard to convince someone getting something for free that they should start forking over dollars.

ams61103• 14 years ago

Compared to what? You can provision your own apps and run your own services for less?

Firehed2• 14 years ago

Google just removed their own ability to convert free customers to paid ones as they grew. Switching cost of email is extremely high, so a startup in this space could easily charge more than $50/yr/user once they're already in.

Granted they're lacking the integration with all of Google's other services, but given how bad google's multi-account sessions are and the fact that basically everyone is logged into their personal gmail account already, that might actually be a good thing.

Plus, $50/yr/user adds up pretty darn quickly at scale. Not as much as all of these video services that cost about $100/yr, but like I said, the cost of switching email providers is insanely high - once you have a customer, it's almost guaranteed you'll have them forever unless you screw up at massive, catastrophic scale. Though because of that, you have to have a crazy-good hosted offering to get people to sign up in the first place; demoing a mail service is hard and Gmail (personal) has been a great way to show what their paid services offer for businesses.

chrisblackwell3• 14 years ago

Fastmail.fm has been around quite a while, and while I still would consider them a success, I don't think they have done much in the form of innovation. Most of the innovation I have seen in email for the year, has been in the form of the client, not the server.

hobbes• 14 years ago

From what I have read on the fastmail.fm blog, etc, they tend to do some very good stuff on the back-end, particularly(open source) contributions to the Cyrus IMAP server. These, I understand, have improved the failover and resilience of the IMAP server a lot. These might not be "innovations" in a technical sense, but they certainly make Cyrus a much better server for Enterprise users.

The less said about fastmail.fm's "innovations" on their web interface the better.

dangrossman2• 14 years ago

> Certainly until today the $ size of the addressable market in the small business email space was practically $0 given Google's position.

Rackspace Mail (formerly MailTrust) has about 200k paying customers for small business e-mail hosting. I've been paying them to host mail on 8 of my domains for years -- Gmail was never appealing to me for various reasons -- so the 24/7/365 support, daily backups and 100% uptime SLA easily made MT/Rackspace the right choice.

It's $2 per mailbox per month, or less than half Google's price, but there's a minimum of $10 a month -- so it's only cheaper if you have at least a couple mailboxes/users.

As an aside, Google also gives away web analytics for free, yet there's still a billion dollars a year spent at other web analytics firms. There are always ways to compete with free.

toomuchtodo5• 14 years ago

I just helped several companies move to Google Apps from Rackspace over the weekend; their web interface is horrible and Google provides a much better experience on mobile (both iOS and Android) than Rackspace ever could.

dotBen3• 14 years ago

so, as it happens Bill Boebel (one of the founders of MailTrust/WebMail.us) is an investor and board member of my startup WP Engine ;)

To be fair, Google Apps for Business didn't get going until 2007 which is also the year Rackspace acquired WebMai.us. I'd say the market for B2B email contracted severely the moment Google Apps's free offering became established.

riobard2• 14 years ago

100% uptime SLA? Really?

drewda• 14 years ago

That's the pattern that has happened to map base-layer tiles since Google started charging: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/daily-report-some-s...

barredo2• 14 years ago

Same with Google Reader. After they shut down Google Reader social features most heavy users flock to newly created services.

When Google Reader was social & free (and without ads) it wasn't perfect but it was good enough to destroy competition.

randomchars• 14 years ago

What are these new services? I seriously can't find anything that's even comparable.

philwelch5• 14 years ago

Any other decent, free IMAP hosts out there? Ever since the Gmail UI shit the bed and mail clients grew an archive button I don't really need Google Apps itself anymore anyway.

KNoureen• 14 years ago

If you have the time for it, you could try a VPS and your own IMAP/SMTP-server and web-interface.

I migrated off Google a year ago to my own server, took a day to sit down and understand/configure it and have since then run smoothly w/o me touching it. And since I host some other people's domains and mail for a small fee, I actually earn a few $ / year.

philwelch5• 14 years ago

How bad is spam if you do that?

zheng• 14 years ago

Wow. Google Apps for Your Domain is a huge thing for a lot of hackers. I run my entire family's email using it. Is google just giving up on supporting custom domains? That would be a huge disruption for me =(

indiecore12• 14 years ago

I posted this below but I was really counting on Google Apps to set up a custom domain email address. I'm just starting some stuff and it's still very "free time" right now and I am really not going to spend 50 dollars a year on it yet.

indiecore12• 14 years ago

GOD

DAMNIT

I was literally 10 minutes away from signing up.

eikenberry• 14 years ago

Be glad it came when it did. It would suck to just get all setup then find out the service has been deprecated.

For everyone with an account, I suggest looking for an alternative soon.

Margh3• 14 years ago

Yerp, we signed up about a month ago and had pretty much just settled in over the past week. Hooray.

thewordis• 14 years ago

According to another blog post, you can still "switch to it" for the next 30 days. So maybe sign up for paid and then immediately switch to free?

http://googleappsupdates.blogspot.com/2012/12/changes-to-goo...

grandpoobah2• 14 years ago

http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2... I started the trial on or after December 6, 2012. You cannot downgrade to the free edition, but you have the option to purchase the product or to cancel your account.

grandpoobah2• 14 years ago

Outlook.com

zsiddique• 14 years ago

This might suck for the power user who had his own domain, but I am betting the free version was abused by a lot of business unwilling to pay a few bucks for the service.

Firehed2• 14 years ago

What's the difference? The cost to Google is presumably the same, except that the user count might have been between two and ten-ish instead of one.

And now they can't upsell those businesses to paid accounts anymore. Established businesses already have email in place, and switching them over will be a hell of a sell.

alanctgardner28• 14 years ago

I wonder if the cause of this is the support costs required for the free accounts? Obviously personal GMail is plug-and-play, but for someone who can't spell DNS, setting up a domain account was never quite drop-dead-simple enough. I suspect the goal here is to create a barrier to entry and prevent the inevitable support load of free users.

There was an excellent post about this a while ago, where a developer reported much better treatment from users after charging a token fee for their app.

As a final thought, maybe Google is catching on to the 'charge what something is worth, not what it costs you' way of thinking. Hosted email solutions for enterprise aren't free, and it seems like Google has realized the real value of their product. Also, ~$4/seat/month is pretty well in line with this kind of SaaS offering.

georgemcbay• 14 years ago

I doubt the support costs were very much. As with all things Google other than being an adsense buyer, support was basically "send us an email and we'll respond with a robo-faq that may or may not have anything to do with your question".

And Google Apps was actually quite easy to setup, partly because Google documented it pretty well but mostly because many DNS providers would basically do a one-click Google Apps setup automatically for you.

lawdawg2• 14 years ago

Google Apps for Business has 24/7 phone support. Maybe you would know that if you actually used Google Apps for Business or read the blog post.

spankalee2• 14 years ago

As a Googler and for much longer, a Google Apps user for my family, this is sad news.

I wish they had just fixed the experience for "vanity domains" so that they didn't require all the enterprise features, and didn't let administrators have complete control of users accounts. Then they could roll out new features to vanity users without needing the enterprise controls.

I understand that this is a little tricky, and involves no paying customers, but Google Apps was by far the best experience for custom domains. I'm sure it attracted the type of influencers that pull even more users. I used it for my family, bands, friends with very small businesses and more, and the other people on those domains not already using Gmail, in turn migrated their personal accounts to Gmail.

rgsteele• 14 years ago

I completely agree with this. I signed up for Google Apps for the sole purpose of having an email address at my own domain, and I always wished I could just have that email address supported by my existing Gmail account, rather than having to deal with the hassle of yet another account somewhere. I would gladly have paid for that.

Google's always been pretty good about making sure you aren't locked in to their services, likely due to the efforts of their Data Liberation Front[1], but it always seemed to me that being locked in to using an @gmail.com email address was a big exception to this.

[1] http://www.dataliberation.org/

spankalee2• 14 years ago

Yes, there's really two parts to a "vanity" domain: I want a nice looking email address, and I want to own my email address no matter what service I use. It's nice to be able to also use an awesome service like Gmail on top of it.

It's worth some value to me, but $50/user/year is a bit much for a family of ~5 light email users.

harshaw• 14 years ago

Agreed, and what's annoying is that there isn't any middle ground in pricing. the XXX/customer/year model doesn't scale for people who don't make, well money.

The family / soccer club / non profit isn't going to spend $250 for five email addresses. I am sure there are other providers that offer similar services for much cheaper - and if not there is a big opportunity.

adowers• 14 years ago

My recommendation would be to use Outlook.com. I am a LONG TIME Google Apps domain admin for SMBs and personal domains. Since this announcement and my feeling of total abandonment from Google for the "small guys" I started investigating. MICROSOFT DOES THIS VERY WELL!!!. Now, that being said, it isn't exactly as polished as the Google Apps experience but the Microsoft re-work of its web mail is great. A quick search will give some good reviews. So...what is a guy to do?...well... you simply go to domains.live.com, go through the registration process. Once complete you will have access the the Admin Center. You then administrate your domain email as you would have in Google Apps. Again, it will be the current Microsoft way BUT it works well. I just did it for a photographer (yep...small business). It works perfectly. Once you register for the Admin Center, you can administrate MULTIPLE domains from YOUR one Admin Center. Also, Microsoft is MUCH more generous with the number of user accounts you can create for your domain...Up to 500 at last count. Naturally it also comes with Calendar, SkyDrive, etc. They give you all of the DNS records you need. Also, once you set it all up...if you go to Outlook.com directly and sign in with your personal domain email address/account, it will do so for you always (if you use the Microsoft DNS records for email---> like mail.yourdomain.com) Otherwise you will initially get the Hotmail interface. Again, a quick search will yield articles for changing to the NEW Outlook.com interface. Happy Hosting!

zmmmmm4• 14 years ago

I really hate it when companies try to sugar coat a decision that is all downside for their customers. It may be really hard to do, but Google should just come out and say it: there is no upside for this to anyone except Google. It is not about giving you a better experience or making things more straightforward. It is all about Google deciding to maximize their profits at the expense of their users. That's fine, it's what businesses (ultimately) do (even the ones that pretend they put their users first). Google should just say it - they no longer want to support a free version of their product because they can make more money another way.

When I see ridiculous sugar coating it breeds distrust and disbelief - congratulations Google, I now believe every single future thing you say a little less, well done.

indiecore12• 14 years ago

>When I see ridiculous sugar coating it breeds distrust and disbelief - congratulations, I now believe every single future thing you say a little less, well done.

And I will especially distrust any new "free" services you decide to offer.

aeturnum• 14 years ago

It seems like the current free customers are just fine ("Please note this change has no impact on our existing customers, including those using the free version."), so how would it cause you to distrust their offers in the future?

jxi• 14 years ago

I understand you're upset, but that's probably a really naive view. Maybe it seems to you that there is no DIRECT upside for you personally, but there's always an upside, just like there's always a downside for every good thing that happens.

This looks to me just synonymous to killing a high maintenance, low returns project so that they can focus better on either the business version or other stuff. The "indirect" upside is you get other Google products of better quality.

zmmmmm4• 14 years ago

To be clear, I'm not so upset about them killing the free version (although I do think it's sad - all the startups I've been in got our google apps accounts before we even had a bank account - because it was free! I wonder what will happen in the future). I mainly dislike the style of communication here. It really wouldn't be so terrible for Google to say:

    While it was very popular we found it was quite costly and 
    we are not able to justify offering it as a free service on
    an ongoing basis. Further we found that people who signed up 
    under free accounts often had false expectations about the 
    level of service and support we were able to give them and it 
    contributed to a negative overall perception of the service.
    We apologize to those who are unable to use Google Apps in the
    future because of this, but we feel it is an important change
    to keep the service profitable and well supported into the future.

alanctgardner28• 14 years ago

This is a pretty pessimistic view. Customers are self-interested too: they want free content and services, but they also want absolute privacy, to ad-block everything, and generally cut off any possible revenue stream. This seems like it leads to a sort of local maxima where you produce the minimum quality required to drive users, with as little cost as possible.

By cutting off ad-supported free users, Google is attempting to pursue a global maxima: rather than making the best 'free-enterprise email/document sharing/whatever else it does because I only use it for email', they're now free to focus their efforts on paying customers. I suspect the one area where this will impact the most is customer service; Google is traditionally horrible because they're loathe to waste money on minimum wage call-centre employees to support loss-leader products. Now that Apps for Domains will be a first-class, revenue generating product, maybe they'll answer the damn phone.

indiecore12• 14 years ago

by cutting off free users they just opened themselves to getting undercut by a smaller company that can offer fewer, cheaper, targeted options.

I just wanted an email for my domain and that's not worth 50 bucks a year. I'll just set up my own email system at this point, call it a learning experience and never be exposed to the rest of whatever was in Google Apps.

johnsea• 14 years ago

The argument is not 'cutting off ad-supported free users' but 'sugarcoating'.

Blabling 'but time has shown that in practice, the experience isn't quite right for either group' when a statement about ~ we are sorry to remove the free ad supported option would have been the honest way.

mnutt• 14 years ago

Google Maps has started trying to monetize, and I don't think that has positively impacted their sales or service.

mrharrison• 14 years ago

Seems like a realistic view, you are just looking at it in a pessimistic way.

capo2• 14 years ago

That's a bit of an overreaction. Unless I'm reading the post incorrectly there aren't any bad news in it really: existing accounts stay free, now you have two tiers, paid and free, and with the paid you get real support for the money (and custom email etc).

jlmendezbonini3• 14 years ago

You are reading it wrong. There's no longer a free Google Apps version. What they refer as free in the post is the classic Google (@gmail.com) account.

EDIT: phrasing

magicalist• 14 years ago

> It is all about Google deciding to maximize their profits at the expense of their users. That's fine, it's what businesses (ultimately) do (even the ones that pretend they put their users first).

Somewhat offtopic, but I always find statements like this rather silly on HN, a site ostensibly focused on and for the startup community. You mention in a comment below that you've worked for several startups. While there, did you only make decisions at the expense of your users to maximize profits?

If not, that's enough evidence to prove your statement wrong.

Most decisions like this are more complicated. While it does make the "I just reserved a domain name and want a google-hosted webmail client for it as soon as possible" case more complicated in the future (and I have one too), in most HN threads on google's poor customer service someone will inevitably bring up the fact that they'd be willing to pay money to get phone support for their Google Apps accounts, even though you've been able to do that for quite some time now. In fact, the whole second paragraph in the article seems to be about businesses that sign up for free, and don't actually understand the limits they accepted in turn.

Eliminating a product for new customers actually can be a net positive in terms of good will of your customers, even if they have to pay more. The post is a little overly cheerful, like they just came up with this brilliant new idea, but your reaction is one better saved for things like finding out a device you own has DRM you didn't know about it, or a company removing something you've paid for with a remote kill switch.

joonix• 14 years ago

It's really see to the "profit is evil" mentality flow from places like reddit into HN, a site that's supposed to be about building companies to make profits.

zmmmmm4• 14 years ago

> While there, did you only make decisions at the expense of your users to maximize profits?

I think you read a little more pejorative into that sentence than I intended (I understand why, it's a common phrasing in that sense). I mean it quite literally: they maximize profits by charging their users money (at their user's "expense") - not "for the overall detriment of their users" as you might (quite reasonably) interpret it.

But in this literal sense, yes, in every startup I've been involved in, we made decisions to make money and we planned for our users to pay that money. I'm not blaming Google for this - it's what businesses do (almost by definition!).

philip1209• 14 years ago

Attempting to "optimize profits" in this manner annoys me mainly because advertising makes up 96% of Google's revenue. 4% accounts for every other source of income they have. If advertising is their strength, decreasing access to business users for advertising in the name of revenue from such a basic service seems like a bad decision.

That being said, if this is this is a precursor to responding to complaints about access to Google customer service by giving all Google Apps business customers access to better support, it may make some sense.

tytso2• 14 years ago

I believe the paid business version of Google Apps has always had the option (by the domain administrator) to turn off advertising for Gmail on a site-wide basis.

yanw• 14 years ago

Judging from this and previous threads people here are either distrusting of free services or aren't willing to pay for the goods (not everyone obviously) which is quite the paradox.

I'll chalk this one down to the startup nature of this community, seeing as some are probably involved with competing products or are developing some, but the matter of fact is that this announcement is perfectly reasonable: “vanilla” gmail accounts are free, Apps accounts are not.

Those who already have free Apps will keep them at the same price, there doesn't seem to be any swindling involved, and look! phone support, imagine that.

mdasen• 14 years ago

You're correct to point out that there's no swindling or bait-and-switch happening here. I get to keep my Google Apps account for free. Google did the right thing.

I think what we're reacting to is that the free tier of Google Apps doesn't seem any different (from a cost perspective) from regular Gmail. They're giving me the same storage, showing me the same ads, providing the same no phone support, etc. The real difference is that I get a custom domain which doesn't cost anything to Google.

$50/user/year also seems expensive if you're not going to use the value-add of the business plans (phone support, 25GB inboxes, etc). Maybe Google could have kept the old system as well (7GB storage, ads) and charged $5/user/year for the vanity domain. $50 is just a lot for what is, frankly, more vanity value add than anything else for many of us. Yes, if you want 25GB inboxes, no ads, SLAs, etc. Google Apps can provide good value add, but I don't need those things.

Google is a private business. What they announced is reasonable for a private business trying to maximize profit. However, it feels less reasonable when one thinks about the cost to provide services. The free Google Apps shouldn't cost more than the free Gmail from Google's perspective. As such, I think it's human nature to say, "then why are you charging more?" "Because they can" is a perfectly reasonable answer, but it does make us think less of Google. Google is the company pushing the Nexus 4 down to $300 to try and prove that top-grade equipment can be more mass market rather than trying to maximize profit with a $500+ Nexus 4. That's the ethos and drive that we've come to love. What Google has done is perfectly reasonable and, in fact, better than most businesses would have done: most businesses wouldn't have grandfathered us in. However, it just doesn't feel like the same Google that turned so many businesses upside-down. In short, it doesn't feel like Gmail. Gmail came along with 1GB of free storage when you got ~10MB from competitors - and Google made it into a profit center pushing the bounds in a way that made them rich and improved our lives at the same time. This just feels like a regular business trying to make money - and that just doesn't feel like Google to us.

Again, I'm not saying that Google doesn't make a ton of money or that they shouldn't or whatnot. I'm merely pointing out that Google's profits often come alongside something that genuinely makes our lives better. Our world is better because Android exists. Our world is better because Google entered search. Our world is better for YouTube. Even AdSense brought relevant ads that were less obtrusive. They're all wonderful for Google too, but they pushed us forward. This doesn't feel like that. This feels like an MBA sitting in a room looking at the number of free Google Apps accounts and thinking "I bet we could convert some of those free-sign-ups into paid ones if we discontinued the free product in the future".

I want to emphasize that Google doesn't owe me anything, but when you see two services that cost the same to provision and one getting priced upward, it just feels icky.

For anyone who might be looking for an option for the future, Zoho offers a free tier for up to 3 inboxes: https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html.

notatoad2• 14 years ago

>Judging from this and previous threads people here are either distrusting of free services or aren't willing to pay for the goods (not everyone obviously) which is quite the paradox.

There is no paradox. Some people are distrusting of free services, others are unwilling to pay. HN isn't one person's opinion, there are many diverse opinions represented in this community.

notatoad2• 14 years ago

Sure there's an upside. There's no upside if you want google apps for free, but legions of free users make products harder to develop. It's likely that paying customers will be seeing faster development and better service.

znowi• 14 years ago

Reality check :) Google isn't a small, open startup anymore. There are layers of corporate bureaucracy that distance public from the company. You happen to deal less with people and more with the system. The focus has long shifted away from users. As a result, we see new features, offerings, and policies gently forced upon for our own good and a better experience.

IceyEC• 14 years ago

Google isn't discontinuing its free service to existing users, they're just no longer offering a free level for new sign ups.

BryanB55• 14 years ago

Sometimes when reading articles from HN I'll try to guess if the comments will be positive or negative. I guessed that these would be positive. I seem to of been wrong though... It seems like every other day there is an article on HN talking about "google down. no support!" and everyone is always saying the problem with Google products is that if something goes wrong you can't get help. I don't know if they offered 24/7 phone support before but to me, it sounded like this was new and they are focusing on offering a service with support and making sure it stays up and reliable for more serious businesses.

miker64• 14 years ago

We have a paid for google apps for business account. Every time I've called for support (email from a particular domain never getting to us, emails to a particular domain never getting to them, queries about outages) I've gotten a very pleasant voice who tells me in no uncertain terms that nothing is wrong, everything is okay, and could I please just f*ck on off and be a happy cog now. So, the service is weak to nonexistent, but at least the people on the phone are apologetic and nice.

laureny• 14 years ago

> When I see ridiculous sugar coating

What are you talking about? There is no sugar coating in this announcement, they just explain loud and clear what they are doing:

> With this in mind, we’ve decided to make things very straightforward. Starting today for all new customers:

Doesn't get more sugar free than this.

Maybe you were referring to Apple a few months ago when they announced their new maps?

davidandgoliath3• 14 years ago

Referring to unpaying users as customers is hilarious. Users are not google's customers, they're google's product.

redthrowaway2• 14 years ago

What really struck me was that they're only offering three nines of uptime. I can't see many businesses ditching Excel or Word to go with something that will cost you half a day of productivity every year, especially not for $50 a license.

ams61103• 14 years ago

What's the "nines" of uptime on a typical corporate desktop? By my back of the envelope calculations it's worse than 3.

toomuchtodo5• 14 years ago

I'll take "Google downtime" (a damn small amount) over any other sort of downtime (Rackspace, AWS US-EAST-1, the hardware on my desk) any day of the week.

redthrowaway2• 14 years ago

Even so, it's not like they're replacing the desktop. This is in addition to the downtime they can already expect.

ygjb• 14 years ago

It really depends how much they go into the Google Apps bit; for $50 you are not getting word and excel, you are getting a whole range of related IT services, including online document sharing with access controls.

That in and of itself is worth a huge amount of money.

krrrh2• 14 years ago

Why do you assume that a company that uses google apps will ditch Word and Excel. I see this logic all the time and it makes no sense. I haven't seen any company that uses google apps delete Office from thier computers. The point of Google Apps is ditching Exchange.

gm_2• 14 years ago

At least with customers being made to sign up to premium accounts with 24/7 support available there will be less horror stories of customers being locked out of their Google Apps accounts.

cnaut2• 14 years ago

Office 365 is much cheaper now - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/compare-plans.aspx?...

jarin• 14 years ago

The cheapest plan (email/calendar/contacts) is only $4 cheaper per year than Google Apps.

cnaut2• 14 years ago

You are right, I misread the pricing the first time. The prices are basically the same now

thpoul• 14 years ago

I wonder how this will affect the various hosts around who offer easy "free" google apps integration.

gm_2• 14 years ago

Dreamhost has added a disclaimer:

(Google may charge you to use this feature.)

Also, when you attempt to sign up, the link redirects to a google apps free trial page.

confluence• 14 years ago

So for hackers it's what? $50 a year for hosting + $10 a year of domain registration for vanity URLs - that's $5 a month.

Don't see much of a problem here - I'm surprised they didn't do this sooner - I'm happy to pay for this service at that price - no problem.

lawdawg2• 14 years ago

whoa whoa whoa, but now its not FREE, and I'm entitled to awesome products for FREE.

loceng4• 14 years ago

I'd imagine this would be ad-free, too..

timv• 14 years ago

Depends what you need to host. If you just want email & a blog, gandi.net will providing hosting for those as part of their domain registration (~$15 per year, depending on which TLD you want).

They also include minimal web hosting with registration too, but last I looked their (free) offering was so bad it didn't really count as a feature.

I imagine some other domain registrars have similar options.

nicholassmith• 14 years ago

I got a domain through gandi and decided to try my email there for a change, it's been pretty reliable and solid, the only time I needed support it was quick. I don't however do a lot of email so my experience might be much different to a power email user.

edj3• 14 years ago

I'm not sure if I'm parsing this correctly, but it sounds like people who use Google Apps as an email backend for personal email on custom domains will now have to pay $50/year.

If so, that's a huge bummer. I only recently switched to running my email this way and I don't relish the thought of migrating elsewhere so soon.

I would happily pay $50/year (or perhaps more... I don't know how high I'd go) for email that's not only convenient and spam free, but also well protected from governments and the provider's employees, and not data mined.

I have absolutely no use for phone support or 99.9 uptime for my personal email. So the businessification of Google mail is not a win for me. Privacy and convenience or what I'm after.

Anyone working on something like this?

digikata2• 14 years ago

I think you missed this sentence. "Please note this change has no impact on our existing customers, including those using the free version." Still, I'm on free google apps mostly for a personal email domain too and will likely start considering alternatives just in case.

I'd also note that the $50/year is also per user, so there's sort of an opening to offer a family, personal domain type service. For a family of a maybe 2-6 users, the $50/year-user is a bit steep if you're mostly looking for a small group email + calendaring. Maybe that would even be an interesting vector for starting a new family-based social networking service.

edj3• 14 years ago

I did miss that. Thanks for pointing that out.

I actually considered an email address like firstname@lastname.com. I figured I could add my parents, or future children.

But this only works for obscure last names or unusual TLDs. There's also the issue of family relationships - people get divorced, grow up and want more independence, etc. Marrying email to a family domain could be messy.

tiziano88• 14 years ago

From the post: "Please note this change has no impact on our existing customers, including those using the free version."

edj3• 14 years ago

I did miss that. Thanks.

gtt• 14 years ago

On a related note could dear hn crowd suggest email provider (maybe paid, say up to 30-40$ annually) caring about my privacy a little bit more? Really delete my messages when I want to is a good start.

Google is all good but I feel I should not put all of my emails in one account..

hmart4• 14 years ago

Rackspace mail $2 per month / account

Tortoise• 14 years ago

I've been using https://www.fastmail.fm/ forever, nothing but good things to say

whichdan• 14 years ago

Seconded. Their latest interface update puts them on par with GMail, and they have quite a few unique features on top of that.

egeozcan• 14 years ago

I'm a very happy customer since years. Probably they have a good support too, but I haven't had any problems so I don't know =)

gregd3• 14 years ago

http://www.cotse.net/

atourgates• 14 years ago

I setup one small business on http://atmail.com/products/ cloud - which seems to work pretty well. It's $2/user/month, most beautiful webmail client I've seen, calendars, contacts, etc...

And, if you'd rather run your own server, you can of course just buy their software. But I don't have any experience running that.

jamesmiller5• 14 years ago

I use Google Apps for my domain but forward the mail to another account which means I see no ads and get hosted mail for free. I didn't even realize until this announcement that I'm probably a net negative and probably not the only person doing this.

jtbarrett• 14 years ago

I have a free Google Apps account mostly so that I can have a custom domain for my small (free) App Engine site: https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/domain

It's sad that now attaching a custom domain will cost a lot more than the domain itself.

Strom• 14 years ago

You can still create a free Google Apps account, limited to a single user, through App Engine [1], Google just doesn't want to advertise this fact to everyone.

[1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine/pVZfdeky-ow...

j_s• 14 years ago

Just wanted to say thanks so much for sharing this; kind of a big deal!

Now to figure out which email should be 'real' for Google App Engine - maybe the 1 user will be 'noreply'!

darkhorn2• 14 years ago

How you create an account using app engine. I cannot see anything in the Administration Panel.

rdl2• 14 years ago

I gave up on Google Apps for your Domain for email a while ago (security, bugs, and the general black box nature of the product).

Right now, my favorite solution is Kerio Connect, which you can either self-host or purchase as a cloud solution. There are hosting providers who will handle all of this for you, but having the option to bring mail fully in house is really nice.

It's essentially Exchange, but much easier to manage, and far cheaper.

They also have a Sharepoint/Box alternative, Workspace, that I now love.

I'm more than happy paying $555 for a server and then $45/user for license, $15/user/year maintenance, and hosting costs. I really don't think $50-100/mo/user (once you factor in admin/hosting costs...you could do it for $20-30/mo but $50-100 is a safer budget) is an unreasonable amount for top quality email and collaboration tools.

larsberg• 14 years ago

Ugh. The worst thing is that I've been relying on my personal domain e-mail address _also_ being a valid google address. So I have to either pony up for my family's accounts or move us all and re-create logins on a page or so of "authorized apps."

Still, the huge amount of spam that's been getting through (10-15 per day, despite always logging in to the gmail web interface and clicking Report Spam) has been encouraging me to consider a move anyway. This change is just the nudge I needed to finally make it happen...

fatbird• 14 years ago

It continues to be free for existing users. They're closing sign up for free usage.

stevoski• 14 years ago

Yes, the announcement is corporate doublespeak.

No, I don't mind the end of free Google Apps. I use Google Apps for my business for five years, and frankly, it is mind-boggling what they have given me for free. Luckily us existing users still get the free service, but if I had to pay US$50 per year per user, I would still consider it exceptional value.

US$50 per year for a set of critical, heavily-used services is an inconsequential amount for all but the most penny-pinching operation.

indiecore12• 14 years ago

and they lost a lot of people who are pinching pennies when they start but would be hooked into the system by the time they needed the upgrade.

adrianm• 14 years ago

I would have (read: I did) assume that, but do we really have any data on whether or not this actually was the case? Google presumably considered this and made a decision based on the data available to them. Now that this decision was announced, it seems that this assumption is false. Google must not be hooking nearly enough businesses into using this system for money or they would not have made this decision. Of course, this assumes Google Apps is run by rational people.

eunice• 14 years ago

Re: everybody saying this was a 'free' service - Google were still harvesting & selling off anything you put in there. It wasn't truly free.

nvmc• 14 years ago

I sorted out my gmail powered trendy n@me-lastname.net email not two weeks ago. Perhaps if they offered a single user package free of charge it would be more sustainable.

napoleond3• 14 years ago

I think it's time for a dedicated email service provider with full search functionality and tools to migrate the old inbox from Google Apps. I would gladly pay more than $50/year for a simple, rock solid service like this if it had an excellent web client, real customer support, and cared about my privacy.

dholowiski• 14 years ago

I would too. Does such a service exist right now?

napoleond3• 14 years ago

Nope, not that I know of. Closest thing is probably http://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/rackspace_email/ which is painful to use in a browser.

I'm seriously considering starting such a service.

Nux2• 14 years ago

https://www.fastmail.fm/ is probably the closest thing to it

napoleond3• 14 years ago

That does look pretty good, thanks! I'd heard of fastmail before, but thought they were just a hotmail clone (personal, not business).

EDIT: https://www.zoho.com/mail looks pretty good, too, and is the least expensive of the pack.

tlogan• 14 years ago

This is actually expected development. As the market matures, it is time to start make money.

This is also means that probably less and less of online services will be free.

Of course, you will still have "Walmarts of the online services" but you will get what you pay for - nothing more.

And I don't think there will be "cheaper" alternatives: but I do expect emergence of more expensive and better alternatives (if you can fork $50/year than you can fork $100/year - free is different story).

hmart4• 14 years ago

An alternative I use for educational customers is Microsoft Live Domains, also have some comercial domains with more than 50 accounts. But given this situation with Google I`m expecting Microsoft to do the same

rajuvegesna• 14 years ago

Google made a mistake initially by 1) Giving too much away for free and 2) Charging too low. It is probably trying to correct these mistakes.

1) On giving too much away…

Remember, Google Apps started with 200 free users, later reduced it to 100, then to 50, then to 10 and now to zero.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/23/google-puts-the-squeeze-on-...

At 200 free users, there was no room for a new entrant in the market. I am glad that didn't last long.

2) On Charging too low...

Back when they launched it, $50/user/year was extremely aggressive pricing. Vendors were charging $50/month. May be Google is realizing they were charging too low. I now see an additional plan with $10/user/month option (which didn't exist earlier).

Disclaimer: I work for Zoho, competition to Google Apps.

cynix3• 14 years ago

> Remember, Google Apps started with 200 free users

And when Google Apps first started, you could request to increase the number of free users. I have an old account with a quota of 500 free users.

GFischer• 14 years ago

I was going to suggest Zoho as an alternative - I have my personal email set up with you guys :) , and had no problems whatsoever.

However, I'm still used to Gmail's web interface, so I redirect my mail there.

benaiah5• 14 years ago

Outlook.com's equivalent offering, https://domains.live.com, is free (Hotmail also offered it, but they've changed the branding). I've been running my email on there for the better part of a decade. To those who point at Office 365, that's similar but different, and it costs money.

If you want a guide, this one seems pretty good: http://www.omegaweb.com/2012/09/how-to-configure-a-custom-do...

Between the mistaken despair over having no good free alternatives to Google Apps and the platitudes and awe over the Gmail/Google Drive integration (which Hotmail/Skydrive have had the exact equivalent of for years) a couple weeks back, I'm starting to wonder why nobody here, when they are all quite tech-literate, seems to have any clue about Microsoft's honestly rather impressive cloud offering.

Most likely they're all in denial.

18pfsmt• 14 years ago

When I last looked, IMAP was not available on the free custom domains. Is that still the case?

benaiah5• 14 years ago

IMAP is not, but the superior Exchange ActiveSync protocol is, through m.outlook.com - despite the name, it's just Exchange, so it works anywhere. See http://help.outlook.com/en-gb/140/bb896613.aspx for more details.

RaSoJo• 14 years ago

Thanks for sharing. This ought to come in handy.

I for one had no clue about such an offering.

thisisdallas2• 14 years ago

I just read a couple of blog posts saying that there is a 500 user limit per domain on outlook.com. Is that right??

benaiah5• 14 years ago

It appears that there is, but this is still more than twice as many as the free version Google Apps offered even at the beginning, and far more than it offered when it closed. The closest MS equivalent to paid Google Apps is Office 365 (it offers more than Apps does, but it's actually cheaper on the basic plan), which has its own limits and pricing structure.

ferdinandp• 14 years ago

sorry but honestly, i aint like subdomain (subdomain.live.com) let's just drop it.

rwhitman• 14 years ago

I'll tell you what the free plan was most useful for: business experiments.

I can't tell you how many small forays into new business ideas I and other folks I know have used google apps to kick off. For a business at high risk of failure and no budget in the early idea stages it was so useful to be able to stitch together a team and workflow really quickly using google apps to see how things pan out. This puts a real damper on kicking off new collaborative ideas

z-factor• 14 years ago

For people who just need email forwarding https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ work great. They charge $0.02/forwarded domain/day. So ~7USD per year per domain. I'm a customer for 5+ years, no complaints.

cwb71• 14 years ago

Elephant killing and hideous website aside, GoDaddy forwards up to 100 addresses for free with domain registration.

tikhonj2• 14 years ago

Wow, now I feel really lucky that I signed up for a free account just a couple of weeks ago.

Then again, being forced to find my own email hosting would have made me less dependent on Google, which may have been a good thing...

fakeer3• 14 years ago

Agree. I really think it's a bad idea to be tied to an ecosystem for all your needs.

I, for one, would sure want to Keep all my chat contacts to some other service than Google/Gmail, Calendar with an independent provider. Unfortunately, unlike Calendar and some other services services like SNS and Chat are dependent upon what and where your other friends are. I would love it if I can have my own chat setup and I can chat with my friends on GTalk and Facebook (no, I don't personally know anyone who uses Yahoo any more or used other services like AIM ever at all).

tikhonj2• 14 years ago

Google chat actually uses Jabber[1]. I believe nothing stops you from using some other Jabber service with GChat.

[1] http://www.jabber.org/

Now Facebook, of course, is another story. My impression is that they use a technology based on Jabber but not compatible with anything outside of Facebook. I could be wrong--I simply never use Facebook chat.

jscheel• 14 years ago

I would be happy with a one-time fee to use my domain name. I don't care about anything else, just the domain name on the email address.

tjbiddle• 14 years ago

Wow, I actually just called Google Apps support the other day for one of my domains to get downgraded back to free G Apps (I had unintentionally signed up for a 30-day trial of Business, and it didn't auto-downgrade, it just suspended my account). Bummer to see this though, I have multiple domains (As I'm sure many do here) and it's nice having a quick setup for one or two @domain.com's.

hmart4• 14 years ago

I'm from a SouthAmerican nation, here the IT budget of small business is pretty limited and Google Apps (even with the 10 accounts limit) was a viable option for them. Google will have to adapt the prices for non USA markets (BRIC, EMEA, Latam) if they want to succeed. Also this movement bring space of innovation for email.

antihero5• 14 years ago

I don't see what they'd lose from offering this free to personal users and non-profits? They do free mail hosting anyway so why prevent it being configurable to a certain domain?

technotony• 14 years ago

Any competitor products out there which are still free? All I want is email for my domains.

smiler• 14 years ago

Surely this should be a lesson that maybe free isn't always the best option...

gprasanth• 14 years ago

Just the other day I was looking for ways to offer email@mydomain to people who request it. I found that GApps was no longer offering free email. So, I ended up using Forwarders in cPanel to do the thing for me.

Forwarders in cPanel simply copy all incoming mail to email@mydomain to myother@email. If I didn't already create an email account email@mydomain, the incoming mail WILL NOT be stored on server which makes this a feasible solution. If I had, incoming mail would be copied to myother@email.

carlsednaoui• 14 years ago

Has anyone tried Zoho?

https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html

luckysh0t• 14 years ago

I signed up my domain for google apps as soon as I registed it about 3 hours ago. Must have been one of the last ones - I noticed they had taken the small text link on the apps homepage away and I had to click through to pricing to get the free version. Obviously Google had kicked off their deployment while I was registering.

Totally taking this as a sign for my next app btw.

therandomguy• 14 years ago

Oh come on... can we just have the gmail piece for free? If you want limit it to 5 addresses so that only really poor hackers use free account and they become your paying customers as soon as they find some traction.

kristofferR• 14 years ago

Wow, I'm so glad I'm grandfathered in! I have 8 users, just for me.

Having to spend $400 on my email (or spend a lot of time either switching or combining mail accounts) every year would be hell.

Achshar• 14 years ago

I have grandfathered 50 users account. No idea what to do with it.

rauar• 14 years ago

Is it a good idea to grandfather the maximum users ? Or will the existing accounts still be able to use 10 users ?

coopdog• 14 years ago

I wonder how this will effect the Google Apps Marketplace https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/?pli=1

At the very least there will be less potential customers now. I imagine some people would have been willing to pay $0 to Google and $15 per user per month for some kind of project management offering, now it's $65 per month, which is really going to hurt new sign ups.

Also for anyone with an existing free account who wants to add new domains, don't forget you can add domain alias's. So you keep the same account but just make it so email from two+ different domains can come in. For tiny ideas that always have the same 1-2 employees it's almost preferable to a whole new account anyway.

tszming• 14 years ago

This might be painful at the beginning but it could be a win-win situation in long term for most parties:

1. Google: can focus on customer service, 2. Google's share holders: more revenue, 3. Competitors: more competitive advantages, 4. Startups: time to disrupt, 5. Users: Email should be decentralized, why rely on a single provider is a good thing?

kurrent• 14 years ago

so will users who pay the $50/year still see ads on their inbox page?

level09• 14 years ago

nope, the premium version is ad-free.

foxylad• 14 years ago

I have no problem paying for a Google Apps account where I actually use Google apps, but at the moment you have to have a Google Apps account to link a domain to an Appengine app. Some of our apps have two or three domains showing the same app, and because you need to have an account for each email address that Appengine sends email from, we have three or four accounts (support, noreply, accounts per domain.

So this move is going to add $600 per year to our costs - all for virtual accounts that don't actually use Google Apps at all.

Hopefully this was unintended, and Google will continue to provide free accounts for domains linked to Appengine apps - or provide another mechanism for linking and authorising sending addresses.

callmevlad• 14 years ago

From the post:

> Please note this change has no impact on our existing customers, including those using the free version.

X-Istence3• 14 years ago

He is specifically stating that as of right now if you want to use Google AppEngine to send email you need to have a Google Apps account.

So after today (no more free accounts) if I want to set up example.com as a domain to send email from on my Google AppEngine webapp, I will have to fork over X amount of money a year to have those essentially non-existent users that are valid mailboxes.

wyck2• 14 years ago

Create a start-up with:

3 way email sync (mobile/web/desktop) like exchange server (or other enterprise stuff)

A slick feature rich UI

Custom domains via MX

Solid spam filtering

There is nothing out there that does this for under 10$/month per user and I think there is a solid market for a better price point.

stock_toaster• 14 years ago

  > There is nothing out there that does this for under 10$/month per user and I think there is a solid market for a better price point.

You realize Google Apps is $50/yr (around $4.16 per month) per user, right?

rustc• 14 years ago

Not to hijack this thread, but I've asked a question [1] about how to setup an email server on a VPS, if anyone could help me(us?) out.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4885281

medell• 14 years ago

2011-07-20: Announces Google Labs will be shutdown 2012-07-03: iGoogle will be "retired" on 2012-11-01 2012-12-06: Google Apps no longer free

I'm not liking the direction they're going as I use all of the above frequently (including signing up new domains for GApps regularly). It always comes down to money at the end of the day.

ErikAugust• 14 years ago

Okay, one MacGyver solution -

Buy one user account - set up a ton of aliases. Set up filters to Gmail inboxes.

Yeah, that feels dirty... I know.

gregd3• 14 years ago

You can only have 20 domain aliases per account.

blhack4• 14 years ago

Huh. Just want to point out that one of the main reasons we're using google apps at my company is that I use google apps for hosting my personal email. When it came time to make a decision on that, and I am the one who makes that decision, I chose google apps because it was already familiar to me.

Poor choice, imho. I'm curious what the actual overhead is for people like me. I have 1 account (as in: 1 email address) that is hosted by google apps. I was going to set up an account for one of my other domains, but not for $50/year. (Per account!)

So full snark here, but it was between google apps, and office 365. I chose GA because o my familiarity with it.

But look here, Microsoft's equivalent offering is free: https://domains.live.com/ I wonder what things will look like when we evaluate google apps next year?

TheCowboy• 14 years ago

You can still setup a forwarding address and change the reply-to address, so users can use regular Gmail for free. It just means that your company will not have control over the account.

Unfortunately, I don't think threatening to leave when you're not paying anything is really a threat at all. $50/year per year is still pretty reasonable for the services provided.

The other option is that Google retires this feature completely, as they've done with other services people might have been willing to pay for, and that seems worse as you have no choice.

blhack4• 14 years ago

We're not paying nothing per year, we're paying almost $10,000 per year.

I understand this is effectively nothing for google; my point was that the reason we signed up for GA to begin with was directly related to my experience with it as a free way of hosting my personal domains' email.

nigelsampson• 14 years ago

I was considering moving from Google Apps to the offering from Microsoft when they released the new outlook.com, however http://domains.live.com doesn't support a catch all email address and I really can't remember all the email addresses I've put out into the wild.

vidyesh• 14 years ago

But the Microsoft's service is nothing like Google Apps. I use both ( for different domains of course ) and Google Apps' service is still pretty practical. Even if you just compare Gmail and the simple services they provide us with.

Its an annoyance at times setting live domains correctly. Also it doesn't support a catch all email address. :(

espeed• 14 years ago

You can still get a free Standard Google Apps Account with one free email address instead of 10.

See https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/google-appengine/pVZfd...

gst• 14 years ago

Just created an account via this link and it doesn't look like the number of users is limited to 1. Have my own user account and was able to create two additional test accounts.

anmo• 14 years ago

> Microsoft's equivalent offering is free:

Something we should all be learning from this is that it's free for now.

wilfra• 14 years ago

Never thought I'd see the day when Google forced me into Microsofts' arms. Wow.

http://domains.live.com was actually far simpler and faster to setup than a free Google Apps account - which I've done probably 20 times and still struggle to figure out each time. MS version took me about two minutes and was extremely easy to understand - and I can't recall the last time I've signed up for an MS web product. Probably Hotmail in 2002 or something.

Great job Big G! lol

thisisdallas2• 14 years ago

I am pretty sure you stole this post right out of my head. First it was the removal of the left sidebar search criteria e.g. search by date as well as removing the image search options e.g. search by image size. Now, Google takes away their free apps plan. I am about to launch a startup/service and the integration of Google apps was going to be part of it. Now, it looks like the integration of Microsoft's live/office services are going to take the place of Google Apps.

Oh well...

vishal0123• 14 years ago

Its a result of a/b testing done 5 months earlier: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/03/free-google-apps-sign-up-pa...

dave_sullivan• 14 years ago

Well... fair enough.

If you use google apps already, nothing changes (if I'm reading this correctly?)

If you're thinking about using google apps, you've got to pay for it now.

Yes, this benefits no one but google. Then again, google has been providing benefit to millions of people with google apps. Running your own e-mail server is not trivial. There's a reason there are no good gmail alternatives--it's harder than it looks.

If I were them, I would have charged for it from the beginning--it's a really useful service. And they could have been real dicks by forcing all current free users to start coughing up dough.

awicklander• 14 years ago

Google decides to charge money for providing a valuable service. Crazy!

Gustomaximus• 14 years ago

I hope they don't do this with Google Analytics next. Not just because it is a great product to get for free (I'm a massive fan vs other systems). To me it would seem wrong to come into the market @ free, wipe out or reduce much of the competitors and then expect everyone to pay up now they have a market dominance.

davidandgoliath3• 14 years ago

They won't. They get data on 100% of your user's / visitors this way and can use that data to advertise to them via their search engine.

alextingle• 14 years ago

Running your own e-mail server is easy. I can't believe how many people here are throwing up their hands in horror at the idea.

jws• 14 years ago

After decades of running my own email servers I gave up because of the never ending blacklisting. Some random ISP will decide that your IP address is in a bad neighborhood and blacklist you. Eventually one of your users will realize that their mail to Aunt Vickie isn't getting through and you'll spend an hour trying to get unblacklisted. You may or may not succeed.

If you own your own block C or larger this may not apply, but if you are renting servers or using a colo there is woe to be had.

ing33k2• 14 years ago

any good alternatives ?

wildchild• 14 years ago

I am confused, if I am google apps oldfag and have 20 accounts. According to http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&topic=29... can I still use it like before or I must remove 10 mailboxes to fit 10 requirement to continue free usage?

nikcub• 14 years ago

Google under Larry Page is obsessed with short-term revenue. They did the same with AppEngine, Maps and now Apps.

Not to mention that I cringed throughout this announcement. They are doing it because it benefits users? C'mon, just tell us you love the money, nothing wrong with that.

jemeshsu2• 14 years ago

It might be a sign that advertising revenue is not growing as expected. My guess.

tnuc• 14 years ago

Does this mean that some of my domains that are going expire might be worth money as they have google apps?

callmeed• 14 years ago

Crap, ALL our customers use google apps for email (because we don't want to host email on our servers and it's free).

All our customers are small businesses (photographers, designers) and usually just make 1 to 3 mailboxes.

Any alternative out there?

vmialik• 14 years ago

The free accounts should stay free. However opening new accounts will not be free :(

pbreit2• 14 years ago

At one point Yahoo was tip-toeing into this market with its Zimbra purchase. I wonder if this move prompts Yahoo to look again? $50 per email account per year leaves a lot of room for competition.

ramsevak• 14 years ago

Actually they forcing small business to move towards hotmail. Spending $500/year for e-mail service is not worth for small (offline) business.

davidandgoliath3• 14 years ago

Just over a dollar day isn't worth it? I'd disagree. But with that said there are reasonable alternatives out there for less.

laacz• 14 years ago

You can still send and receive e-mail to classic @gmail.com setting up default reply-from address to you@yourdomain.com.

mokash3• 14 years ago

I use Google Apps with my personal domain. A lot of people are recommending alternatives but the main reason why I like Google Apps is that I can use it to easily sign into YouTube, Google Docs and various other services that they provide with my personal, official email address.

I use Google Apps for a small blog that I run and I gave out email addresses to all of the writers. Eventually we had 11 writers and they only allow 10 free so I upgraded that one. People can't do that now. It's either all or nothing.

Meh, their loss. May have to go with Microsoft's alternative or something.

yitchelle• 14 years ago

Google apps for education is still free (I wonder for how long.) At least google is focusing on charging for things that are revenue generating, however for some education enterprise, that is debatable.

http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/education/

4lun2• 14 years ago

Found a workaround to still sign up for the standard plan, modify the following URL to include your domain: http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/standard/selectDomain?existin...

Likely to be disabled very soon.

alexenko• 14 years ago

Instead of giving you a free plan, it gives you a 30 day trial :(

4lun2• 14 years ago

Yep you're right, they just haven't gotten around to updating the copy on the form.

speleding• 14 years ago

The free Google Apps was perfect for families: give each kid a nice kid@familyname.com and no problem with the silly 18 year limit that gmail has. The shared calendars work great in our family too.

It's certainly not worth $50 per year because the little ones get maybe 1 email a month from grandma. Since Google does not allow kids on gmail, where should families go now?

mokash3• 14 years ago

I never thought about using Google Apps like this. It actually sounds pretty cool to be honest. If my whole family was using it, then I'd probably consider paying $50/year for the service.

mcherm• 14 years ago

But would you pay $50/family-member? (Which is presumably a significantly bigger amount of money.)

6ren• 14 years ago

Google believes the cloud/apps have enough providers now, so they aren't needed to drive it.

Their strategy is to grow the web. This works because they make more money from the web being used. It also makes people love Google, which is important because switching search engines is easy. The love also helps in hiring.

However... they have introduced internal cost accounting, so that products must pay their way - a little internal market. IMHO, this is potentially dangerous, since there already is a market (the real one), and it ignores the advantages of a firm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm) But they don't follow it absolutely, e.g. android isn't paying its way. (NB: Apple is focussed on making better products, not on growing the web).

If google can see that other firms are better placed to do a better job of growing the web in some respect (or they can apply pressure on them to do so), they are happy to step aside.

Nux2• 14 years ago

Well, they probably filled their belly with enough user-base, now they can ignore the rest and focus on cashing in.

intlect• 14 years ago

A few years ago they were inadvertently dropping the link to the free signup... now they've killed the product. Not fun... http://googleenterprise.blogspot.ro/2009/07/google-apps-stan...

iashishsinha• 14 years ago

http://www.nextbigwhat.com/google-apps-free-for-new-domains-... : This is a nice workaround. Try it out. You can still use it for free using the existing account.

camus• 14 years ago

Could someone explain me why a business providing a service should ? give it for free ? are google engineers working for free ? is google running its servers for free ? so yes , google is rich , but so is your electricity company , most gaz companies and most supermarkets. Do they give you stuffs for free ? "freemium" model is dead , in the future you'll pay for every service you use on the web.

brandonfish• 14 years ago

yes, your electricity company cannot earn money using ads. google's business is mostly built on ads. see the difference?

michaelbuddy• 14 years ago

I agree with you on some points here, but your statement, 'freemium is dead' makes no sense. Gmail and all included apps is the free and Google Apps (business) is the pay premium. If anything the model is seen fully validated here, not dead.

mrcrassic3• 14 years ago

$50 for only THREE 9's? NO THANKS. :p

It sucks that they've removed the free version; it's definitely a step up from managing multiple individual gmail accounts or creating a shared account of some sort. (I use one for one of the side jobs I do; it's a pain in the ass.)

However, $50/year for premium is really friggin good, considering that the cheapest alternative is $10/mo ($100/yr) for hosted Exchange 2010 alone.

smallegan• 14 years ago

I wonder how soon it will be before they eliminate free domestic calling on Google Voice?

jemeshsu2• 14 years ago

I hope Google can offer a cheaper plan for those who needs only domain and email.

amitagrawal• 14 years ago

With this decision, I have now come to believe that Google is not the company that it used to be in the past. The user-friendly company with a quirky personality.

Somewhere in the mindless fighting with becoming the dominant social and mobile force on the planet, it has forgotten about the very users it once strived to please.

This has been more apparent since Larry took over Google as the CEO. His "more wood behind fewer arrows" has somewhere down the line taken away the humor with which Google has largely operated. 20% time? Google Labs? Hugely popular Google products scrapped into oblivion.

The only products that matter beyond search are - Android, Google+, YouTube and Google Apps which are fairly mature by now and are a serious threat to competitors.

The thing is they didn't need to do it because they aren't starving of computing resources for more important products and the marginal costs of adding free users is almost nil (although it exists).

I somehow feel betrayed by this decision. Google, so far, has resisted the temptation to shut down products that were important to it's users unlike other companies like Microsoft and Yahoo! I have been using Google Apps since they launched it a long ago. It feels like bait and switch.

This is completely right and there is nothing wrong with them shutting down a free service as a business but somehow it feels so non-Googly.

netfire• 14 years ago

Seems like a strange move by Google. Most small or starting businesses don't need a 25GB inbox (at least not every user) or 24/7 tech support. Why create the barrier to entry? Now people with businesses will be more likely to use personal Google accounts for business or look for alternative services. Why not just create a premium business account option that gives you this level of storage and support if you need it, instead of trying to convince your users that they need it, when most of them are happy without it.

Personally, I liked the direction Google was heading with their Google Drive product. You get up to 5GB for free and then pay for more if you need it. Makes me wonder how Google might try to monetize other products like Google+ once they have a substantial following.

kevando• 14 years ago

Does this mean my old domains with 50 free users are now worth more?? :)

tharris01012• 14 years ago

I'm confused here. It says nothing changes for existing customers but when I log into my domain's Google App dashboard I see this now: "Free 30 day Google Apps for Business trial" with an upgrade button. Does anyone else see this?

tharris01012• 14 years ago

To answer my own question. I see now that it isn't saying that I am currently using a free trial, the button is to upgrade and get the free trial.

This is important though. DO NOT TRY THE FREE TRIAL UNLESS YOU PLAN ON STICKING WITH IT.

After yesterday, even if you have a legacy free account, you give up that privilege if you try the free 30 days. See here:

http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6...

jarjoura• 14 years ago

Not to change the subject, but this decision just made my switch to Office 365 that much sweeter. If anything I love that I get push notifications (active sync) for emails and group calendars work much better.

admiralpumpkin2• 14 years ago

I just did a little research to see what alternatives are out there for custom domain emails. I haven't used these Namecheap for email, though I have used them for domain hosting after the SOPA debacle.

Namecheap offers custom domain email hosting for $2.99/user/year. 3GB storage. Supports IMAP. 50MB attachment limit. No ads. No clue on the web interface quality, nor spam-filtering quality, but it's definitely a good price from a good company.

admiralpumpkin2• 14 years ago

In reading the comments generally I feel like there's two main groups being affected here: small businesses and small groups (families, geeks, whatever).

The first group—small businesses—can of course afford $50/user/year, even if they would rather not spend it.

The second group—enthusiasts—even if they could afford it, likely cannot justify $50/user/year. I personally have a custom email hosted by Google for a small group of my friends, and I know that there is NO WAY any of us would pay $50 each per year. The price would need to be an order of magnitude lower for us to consider it. (Yes, I know that for the moment we're grandfathered in.)

Seems like there should be a way for Google to distinguish between the two groups based on services needed and then price two tiers accordingly. For example, offer a Small Group Plan at $5/user/year with a limit of 10 users & no phone support; and another Small Business Plan that offers up to 50 users, limited phone support & whatever else help small businesses for a higher price.

TheYComb• 14 years ago

I would even pay $50 a year if Google stopped making "improvements" to the UI. The new composer looks nice at first but it slows me down when I need to use different fonts, etc AND they removed background color AKA highlight. I do not use Evernote just because they do not have highlight... and now they decided to removed it from Gmail too. If it is not broken, don't fix it :-/

circa• 14 years ago

bummer. the first thing I do when I buy a new domain is sign up there. they make it so easy to manage. all good things must come to an end I guess.

Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

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