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Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

googleenterprise.blogspot.com

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Re: Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

#141

Post by ygjb »

redthrowaway wrote: post #25

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.

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.

Re: Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

#142

Post by cynix »

capo wrote: post #129
jlmendezbonini wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah that's what I mean by the "free tier".

Gmail and Google Apps are completely different products. You can't say Gmail is the "free tier" of Google Apps.

Re: Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

#143

Post by adrianm »

indiecore wrote: post #118
stevoski wrote: post #101

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…

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.

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.

Re: Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

#144

Post by benaiah »

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.

Re: Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

#145

Post by mjn »

skyhook_mockups wrote: post #109
indiecore wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From my own experience I can tell you that running your own mail server is a massive PITA. There's a good chance that even if you jump through all the required hoops to improve trust for your domain you will still have trouble delivering mail to certain addresses (Hotmail is notoriously hard to get white-listed for). Then there's spam... don't even get me started on spam filtering. For me personally $50/year is a bar…

If it's just deliverability that's an issue, you can use the regular Gmail SMTP server for outgoing mail, without Google Apps. You just have to add the address you're sending from as an alternate address in Gmail.

The rest is still a bit of a hassle.

Re: Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

#146

Post by rwhitman »

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

Re: Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

#148

Post by digikata »

natrius wrote: post #104
indiecore wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can send as any email address you have access to. Some email clients show the GMail address as well when the email is sent through GMail's SMTP servers. It's suboptimal, but there are plenty of SMTP services you could use if you want to get around that.

I setup my email that way years ago and abandoned it. At that time, it caused a lot of my outgoing emails to get flagged as spam because of the mismatch of various mail headers between the Gmail domains with the various to/from/reply-to domains. Don't know if it would trip fewer spam filters now.

Re: Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

#149

Post by superuser2 »

indiecore wrote: post #66
alanctgardner2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 atte…

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.

>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.

And?

Free users threatening to leave are hilarious (even better when they campaign against ad targeting and AdBlock everything). Google's decision pretty clearly signals that users like you aren't worth it to the company any more than Google Apps are worth $50 to you. Don't do business. That's the point of a market.

I wouldn't pay for it either - I'm grateful that my Google Apps are grandfathered, but nobody is entitled to GMail, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It's a voluntary transaction between two entities and, in this case, you and Google Apps aren't a good fit.

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