Google Workspace increasing prices from April 11, 2023

I tried moving away from Workspace to Offi^H^H^HMicrosoft 365 last month. I chose 365 since my wife primarily uses a Surface and Microsoft products, which would make it easy for us to collaborate.

It looks like an excellent solution for SMBs or larger who have a dedicated admin that can tend to it.

For a nobody like me, it was a hot goddamned mess. Death by a few big cuts and thousands of small ones.

These are the things that bothered me most, in no particular order:

- Microsoft has a migration service to move email, calendars, and contacts into 365 from Workspace! Wanna find it? Good luck! It's buried (IMO) deep into the onboarding documentation. Finding it was not obvious at all.

- The migration service also didn't work! I had a few years of emails and calendars in my Workspace. It would frequently error out due to API timeouts, even while transferring. While I was eventually able to get (most of?) my emails into 365, I had to import my calendar and contacts manually. (I wasn't confident that 365 got _all_ of my emails either.)

- 365 and Google don't map contact fields one for one. As a result, while I had all of my contacts on my devices, their numbers were missing. Fixing this took longer than I wanted it to.

- "OneDrive" for Business is a complete joke compared to Google Drive. Microsoft's offering is "here's a 30GB SharePoint installation". This was particularly troublesome for me given that my wife and I have a shared folder on Google Drive and an equivalent on OneSharePoint wasn't immediately obvious.

- There are 750 billion different Admin panels! You can configure everything in your Workspace tenant from admin.google.com. On 365? You'll need to use admin.exchange for your mail, Azure (!!!) for your authentication, portal.office.com for some other stuff, etc.

- 365 enables passwordless auth through Authenticator, which is a good thing, but this also disables IMAP login, which is not good.

- Due to Microsoft pushing admins to use PowerShell more often several years ago, there are many configuration options that cannot be done by UI. You need to do it via PowerShell. While this isn't a problem for me (PowerShell used to be my primary language years and years ago), this is a problem when I want to make a change that took less than five minutes to do on Workspace.

- In the year of Our Lord 2023, Microsoft thinks it's appropriate to give Microsoft 365 users at 50GB inbox by default. 50! GIGABYTES!

- Exchange's anti-spam filtering is outrageously aggressive! This was the final straw for me. A lot of really important email would get sent to Junk (which has an auto-delete policy by default!) I had to check my Junk folder every day, something I haven't needed to do in years on Google Workspace. I'm sure there's a setting deep within admin.exchange to tune this, but it was not obvious when I looked.

So while I'm not a huge fan of paying Google $12/month ($20/mo now), it's still the best solution for people like me who want more than what Gmail and Calendar can provide but not an entire enterprisey solution.

It’s not unlimited storage though? It used to be but my understanding is that they started enforcing the storage limits late last year.

Workspace and Personal accounts use different payment systems. Last I checked the personal account storage payments were through Google Wallet.

For Workspace accounts there probably isn't an option for end-users to pay for a year ahead. For resellers like me, we used to get discounts a few years ago if we had clients go on annual contracts. They removed those discounts so we steered the majority of clients to flex plans.

If that wasn't enough of a motivation to go flex, whatever clown MBA's run this division of Google decided it would be fun to create a new certification system for resellers over the past couple years. We didn't complete the 12 hours or so of Powerpoints and exams so while I can provision new customers if I have an annual contracted customer smack the resource limits I can't actually upgrade their license unless I rage at Google Partner connect to override and do it for me. Leaving customers on flex gives us the ability to upgrade and downgrade at will. It's literally the only company I've ever dealt with that makes it this hard to upgrade to a higher paid contract, they just leave money on the table. There's absolutely no incentive for a small reseller like me to upsell an annual contract that chains my hands, this notice that the discounts are coming back is such a joke.

That hasn't been my experience with ZOHO at all. I used their free service first and then stepped up. Their tools are not great and they really love to sell you multiple licenses to get the basic stuff going. I'm sure people have different needs but I won't be using them again.

Hmm, unfortunate if they discontinued it. Maybe my account was grandfathered in.