Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

googleenterprise.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 475 posts

Re: Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

#11

Post by nuclear_eclipse »

justincormack wrote: post #9
revelation wrote: post #2

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.

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

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

Re: Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

#18

Post by alanctgardner2 »

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.

Re: Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

#19

Post by cllns »

ampersandy wrote: post #4

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?

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.
Post reply on HN