New Pricing for G Suite Basic and Business Editions(cloud.google.com)
cloud.google.com
New Pricing for G Suite Basic and Business Editions
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/new-pricing-for-g-suite-basic-and-business-editions
47 comments
I'm also a little surprised they're raising prices.
They are leveraging(forcing?) their dominance in email to charge more. OTOH, I'm finding their docs stuff to be pretty good these days.
They are leveraging(forcing?) their dominance in email to charge more. OTOH, I'm finding their docs stuff to be pretty good these days.
As an aside, Nextcloud with Collabora Online is improving considerably:
https://nextcloud.com/
https://nextcloud.com/
Right, and it felt like 8 inches of blah, blah, some analysts might care about this history, before they got to the news of raising prices.
Also agree about questioning why Google isn't pricing to create network effects.
Also agree about questioning why Google isn't pricing to create network effects.
I am a long-time user of GSuite/ Google Apps for Work and have a custom domain with accounts for my family members. I updated my free tier account from 2009 to a paid subscription in 2014, which I must say now, was a big mistake. The biggest drawback I see currently is that some features will never come to GSuite, like family subscriptions for Google Play Music and sharing of purchased apps and movies. Every purchase made with my GSuite account will be gone, if I choose to cancel my subscription and decide to go somewhere else. This is what really bothers me currently and prevents me from switching to another service. It would be fair, to have a GSuite-to-Free account functionality somewhere for the Google Play purchases. I would also be happy, if they would keep a cheaper GSuite subscription for families with less features but all the family sharing options.
Beside that, I am not completely sure, if it is legal to have purchases/ paid digital goods linked to a monthly/annually paid account.
Beside that, I am not completely sure, if it is legal to have purchases/ paid digital goods linked to a monthly/annually paid account.
The odd thing is that you can freely share family subscriptions bought on a single GMail account with members of a GSuite org.
As an aside, google breaks things for the free users of gsuite (academic or grandfathered accounts) and shows no intent to fix it. While its understandable that they don't provide a high level of support, breaking things and not fixing them doesn't give me confidence to ever want to pay for the higher tier products.
example: gmail's "default routing" is mostly ignored with the proviso that it knows that the rules exist so if one creates a user that corresponds to an email already in the default routing section, it complains.
example: gmail's "default routing" is mostly ignored with the proviso that it knows that the rules exist so if one creates a user that corresponds to an email already in the default routing section, it complains.
We have to ask the question...why do these vendors keep increasing prices? Shouldn’t the economies of scale reduce prices instead? AWS has the right attitude to keep reducing prices. We need this attitude in software.
Its either greed or market pressure to keep showing increasing profits/growth.
PS: I am with Zoho. We recently reduced prices. https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html
Its either greed or market pressure to keep showing increasing profits/growth.
PS: I am with Zoho. We recently reduced prices. https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html
As a user of Zoho who switched from GSuite. I've been very happy with your service so far. Support got back to me quickly when I needed help and the documentation answered most of my questions. I find some of the plans a bit confusing, but I can do everything I need to do. I didn't even realize prices went down, but whatever I paid was a good deal for what I've gotten. Thanks!
I am not affiliated with Zoho in any way.
I am not affiliated with Zoho in any way.
Thanks for posting this, I've been looking for an alternative for my grandfathered G-Suite account.
I have a couple small businesses on it for nothing other than convenience. I clicked this hoping for a pleasant surprise but instead got an expected reality. No problem, email migration is one of the easiest out there (as long as you aren’t to tangled in their other services) and I find myself using clients more than their web interface anymore so much of the gmail advantage is non-existent.
Was the gmail advantage ever in their web interface? For me it was always their spam handling that set them apart from everyone else.
> Was the gmail advantage ever in their web interface?
Compared to hotmail and yahoo mail it was, compared to a desktop client not so much.
> For me it was always their spam handling that set them apart from everyone else.
It seems they've done such a good job that there isn't much of a spam market anymore, looking in my spam folder (gmail) I'm averaging 1-2 a day and that includes false positives.
On the corporate email using a different filter I only see about 1 spam message get through a year, so they might not even have a competitive advantage there.
Compared to hotmail and yahoo mail it was, compared to a desktop client not so much.
> For me it was always their spam handling that set them apart from everyone else.
It seems they've done such a good job that there isn't much of a spam market anymore, looking in my spam folder (gmail) I'm averaging 1-2 a day and that includes false positives.
On the corporate email using a different filter I only see about 1 spam message get through a year, so they might not even have a competitive advantage there.
This could backfire. While $2/mo is no big deal, a lot of smaller customers don't actually need the "Business" flavor so they could downgrade to "Basic". Or they could consider moving to Microsoft: $12 per user is substantially more than Office 365 Business (which costs $10 per user per month, or just $8.25/user/mo with 1 year commitment).
Or move to FastMail.
FastMail offers spreadsheets, word processing, and cloud storage now?
No, but your business might not need those features. Why pay for what you’re not using?
Most businesses do need those features. Businesses using only mail are relatively few and far between.
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true, but they might not need all of their documents in the cloud. Google Sheets/etc is still going to be free, Office is affordable, or even the Pages/Numbers/Keynote option works if you're a Mac shop.
Or perhaps even LibreOffice.
Or perhaps even LibreOffice.
You can't use a free version of Google Drive if you run a business.
You'll eventually need to be able to turn off access for employees who leave, and run audits to verify that you're in compliance around data security. If you're on the free version, even if you have everyone re-create an account with their company email, you still can't administer anything and you'd be forced to ask your staff for their passwords in order to verify sharing access.
You'll eventually need to be able to turn off access for employees who leave, and run audits to verify that you're in compliance around data security. If you're on the free version, even if you have everyone re-create an account with their company email, you still can't administer anything and you'd be forced to ask your staff for their passwords in order to verify sharing access.
That's not going stop people from trying, and stumbling along the way. shrug
Nothing stops you from having a free Google account with those features on an email account hosted by Fastmail.
Office 365's $10/user/month plan does not come with email. Its essentially just Active Directory + Office.
You need to pay $15/user/month to add Exchange ($12.50/user/month with annual contract).
You need to pay $15/user/month to add Exchange ($12.50/user/month with annual contract).
$5 a month for Office 365 Essentials, includes email, and online versions of office.
https://products.office.com/en-us/compare-all-microsoft-offi...
https://products.office.com/en-us/compare-all-microsoft-offi...
$5 per user per month.
Wait. So am I getting this right? They scrapped Hangouts, in favour of 2 seperate apps, Hangout Meet and Hangout Chat, and they are using that as a reason to raise their prices?
Cloud Search seems interesting. But the email auto-completion isn't full enough, especially in a business environment to even bother using. None of this is worth a 20% increase in prices...
Cloud Search seems interesting. But the email auto-completion isn't full enough, especially in a business environment to even bother using. None of this is worth a 20% increase in prices...
I have heard stories of one bad employee account locked by Google make the whole domain being locked. It take days to contact unlock...
Literally just a 20% price hike.
Why bother with all the fluff, just say, "We're charging you 20% more now."
Why bother with all the fluff, just say, "We're charging you 20% more now."
Honestly, for what they are offering it’s still pretty cheap, if you include Gmail, G-Suite and Meet. I’d love them to have a proper chat app though.
There is a lot of young startups offering just a single product for a higher monthly price. Still, I was thinking that Google cares more about the adoption of its cloud office package and probably doesn’t get a lot of its revenue from it.
There is a lot of young startups offering just a single product for a higher monthly price. Still, I was thinking that Google cares more about the adoption of its cloud office package and probably doesn’t get a lot of its revenue from it.
Literally the only reason I pay for GSuite is to be able to use Gmail with my custom domains. I imagine a lot of their Basic membership subscribers are similar. This might be a deal-breaker for me because I was already debating on if it was worth the $5/mo.
Are there any other solid alternatives that the HN crowd can recommend?
Are there any other solid alternatives that the HN crowd can recommend?
Check out Migadu. They are a Swiss company and offer unlimited domains and mailboxes for just $4 a month. The only drawback is that you can only send 100 emails a day combined from all your email addresses. Good for personal use I guess.
They also have higher tiers if you want to send more emails.
https://www.migadu.com/en/pricing.html
They also have higher tiers if you want to send more emails.
https://www.migadu.com/en/pricing.html
Omg! That's absolutely exactly what I need for all my sites. Thank you!
And it gets even better
Before paying a cent, all our users evaluate Migadu through our free, unlimited trial plan. The free plan supports one email domain, unlimited number of mailboxes, 1 Gigabyte of email storage and 10 outgoing messages per day which include a discreet signature "Sent via Migadu" at the bottom of each message.
If the limits of the free trial plan fit your needs and you do not mind the signature, you are welcome to stay on the free plan forever. There is no time limit. Upgrade only when ready and convinced.
I mean I rarely sent more than 10 email on my personal account. It is more of a receiving end. And this is awesome.
Edit: This needs to get submitted to HN in later hours for more exposure.
Before paying a cent, all our users evaluate Migadu through our free, unlimited trial plan. The free plan supports one email domain, unlimited number of mailboxes, 1 Gigabyte of email storage and 10 outgoing messages per day which include a discreet signature "Sent via Migadu" at the bottom of each message.
If the limits of the free trial plan fit your needs and you do not mind the signature, you are welcome to stay on the free plan forever. There is no time limit. Upgrade only when ready and convinced.
I mean I rarely sent more than 10 email on my personal account. It is more of a receiving end. And this is awesome.
Edit: This needs to get submitted to HN in later hours for more exposure.
I just switched off gmail in favor of FastMail
I have grand-fathered accounts for my custom domains from when it was free, but I still just forward and delegate to my free non GSuite personal gmail. If Google ever kills those I'm gonna just move the domains to a different mail provider and forward to my personal gmail the same way.
I just switched from GSuite to https://www.pobox.com. For $20 a year they manage your email address and forward anything sent to it to another account. I have a gmail free account set up to send emails via smtp through pobox, which works great. It's the service a lot of open-source people use, like gitster.
EDIT: Looks like https://improvmx.com do the same thing, but for free.
EDIT: Looks like https://improvmx.com do the same thing, but for free.
To just forward emails from your private domain, you can transfer the domain to NameCheap and use their free email forwarding service.
Exchange Online is $4/user/month with annual billing.
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I wonder their reason behind the price increase,
Inflation as in developers salary is forever increasing.
Or they charge more just because they can.
Inflation as in developers salary is forever increasing.
Or they charge more just because they can.
I used Hangouts today and it was really bad.
Had much better experience with AWS Chime and Zoom.
Had much better experience with AWS Chime and Zoom.
We've been using Google Meet https://meet.google.com which is the current comparable to Zoom, Webex, etc. It's pretty solid. Actually like it more than other services. Curious, what issues did you face?
TLDR: We are increasing prices 20%.
I'm also a little surprised they're raising prices. I figured this monthly revenue was practically nothing on their bottom line, and that they would prefer to keep users on their platform for network effect reasons.
Their chat product also kinda sucks. Ever tried searching your hangouts for a nugget of information? Generally when I think I've typed something in hangouts, I do a search, find absolutely nothing relevant (despite knowing it's in there somewhere), give up, and just check another source.