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Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

9to5google.com

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Re: Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

#231

Post by ryandvm »

vl wrote: post #74
AndrewDucker wrote: post #17

I created a free account many years ago for my family. We've all been using it ever since for everything. So I have a lot of purchases and history in there. All of my YouTube stuff, all of my Android purchases. Everything to do with Google. And now they're going to start charging me $70 per family member or delete all of their purchases for the last decade or so. To say I'm aghast is putting it mildly.

To be fair, they stopped giving it away for free 10 years ago (I asked Urs at the time, and he said “it’s too hard to support and test another edition”, whatever). But I’m pissed as well, probably just gonna pay.

80,000 fucking software engineers and they can't handle an extra SKU on their multi-tier product line?

Re: Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

#232

Post by KallDrexx »

yaacov wrote: post #81

> As of December 6, 2012, Google stopped offering the free edition to new customers. 10 years of a free product is not bad

It's not just that I can't use them for email anymore. I wouldn't mind that.

But now I'll lose access to any purchases on my phone, my Youtube purchases and history, I need to create a new account for my phone, etc....

Re: Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

#233

Post by herodoturtle »

uallo wrote: post #203
herodoturtle wrote: post #91

What are some (paid) alternatives to using G-Suite for emails? Context: We're a small but relatively old SaaS company. Been happily using G Suite's free tier since day 1 - only for email. This announcement is a tad disappointing, but as other commenters have said, 10 years of a free product is pretty great. We'll likely upgrade to Google's paid tier, but out of curiosity, since we're switching to a paid service, we m…

https://protonmail.com/

Thanks will check this out. Hand't heard of them before.

Slightly more expensive than Fastmail but seems like better security / privacy considerations.

That said, the space per inbox seems far more limited.

Seems we have some interesting options here!

Re: Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

#234

Post by webmaven »

mgraczyk wrote: post #49

I'm a Google employee who just found out about this. I'm not annoyed that I have to pay, it's been ~13 years of free service and I don't think Google is obligated to continue providing this to me. The annoying part is that Google doesn't provide any migration tool, but there are migration tools for Google Edu accounts so that graduating students can migrate their data to personal Google accounts. The software is evid…

> Obviously our use case isn't that common (it's been "legacy" for years) but still annoying to know that there's probably some script I could run to do this, but nobody has built the web UI for it.

Sounds like a perfect opportunity for a 20% time project. Surely you aren't the only Googler in this situation?

Re: Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

#235

Post by ADent »

halostatue wrote: post #113

Does anyone have any recommendations on _easy and inexpensive_ ways to migrate an entire family off this (6–7 users)? The value we get is _not_ worth ~$500 US per year. I don’t need a full business suite. I mostly need the email and calendar. I’d need to poll other people whether they use Google Drive or not.

I am using MXRoute.com. They have a lifetime account with unlimited addresses and some limits.

Looks like the price has gone up since I signed up, but so did the storage included.

Re: Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

#236

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

theossuary wrote: post #226

I'm definitely getting screwed over by this. I've hosted close friend's and family's email for a decade now on an old G Apps instance. We only ever used it for email on a custom domain. It was most useful because I could reset passwords for them if they forgot it. Now I'm going to have to figure out what to do. Microsoft's Family offering is way better (not saying much considering Google doesn't have one). Right now…

> But I have no idea what the migration of a decade of email across 5 inboxes will look like; not to mention Calendar and contacts.

Contacts and Email seems to be the easy part: you can download the emails via IMAP to a client like Thunderbird, and the re-upload them on a new account. Years ago I did this transferring from one G Suite account to another for a friend, worked very well. Contacts can be exported in CSV and then imported bia CSV, no big deal too. I have routinely transferred loads of contacts between different systems this way, including Gmail. With calendar, I never had a necessity to transfer data, but I imagine that there are ways, given that it uses a standard iCalendar format.

Re: Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

#238

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

beerandt wrote: post #200

At some level, it's been sort of nice that Google has been nudging me off of their platforms one product at a time, while reminding me to not become overly reliant on the ones I continue to use.

True, Email and docs were their last products I used to do anything real.

Re: Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

#239

Post by jfengel »

KallDrexx wrote: post #225
jfengel wrote: post #100

Huh. I thought that was what I had, but I haven't heard this directly from them. It's the first I've heard of it. I used a microscopic subset of the features. Aside from them hosting my email, I don't think I'm any different from other users. It's just me; I'm not really a business. I notice some differences, mostly in limitations: less storage, features of my Pixel phone that sometimes don't work with that account.…

This is the first I've heard of this as well. I went to admin.google.com and verified that this does impact me. Glad I check HN I guess??

Thanks for the tip. I went to admin.google.com and I don't see anything there, either.

Maybe it's rolling out?

Re: Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

#240

Post by wombat-man »

wodenokoto wrote: post #122
herodoturtle wrote: post #91

What are some (paid) alternatives to using G-Suite for emails? Context: We're a small but relatively old SaaS company. Been happily using G Suite's free tier since day 1 - only for email. This announcement is a tad disappointing, but as other commenters have said, 10 years of a free product is pretty great. We'll likely upgrade to Google's paid tier, but out of curiosity, since we're switching to a paid service, we m…

If you’re not using the productivity suite (docs, drive, sheets and whatnot) why not go with the little guy and use Fastmail? $5/user with 30gb or 100gb per user for $9/month Their support replies faster than google :)

Yeah I'm happy with fastmail and it just makes it less confusing when I'm doing stuff online. Instead of having 2 google accounts, one legacy and one custom domain. My custom domain is a completely different site unattached to the entire google ecosystem.

I already deal with this enough at work. I don't like having to switch between g accounts all the time.

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