7 ms·

Google Workspace increasing prices from April 11, 2023

164 points by lightwin 4y ago

correlator 4y ago
It looks like you need to pay for a full year upfront to keep the legacy pricing. The month to month payment plans are seeing a price increase.
jefftk 4y ago
Up 20%: Starter: $6 -> $7.20 Standard: $12 -> $14.40 Plus: $18 -> $21.60 They are also introducing an annual payment option where you can pay the old per-month prices ($6, $12, $18).
- alberth 4y ago
  Let's not forget that just 3.5 years ago, prices were increase by 20% then as well. Starter: $5 -> $6 Standard: $10 -> $12 https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/new-pricing-for-g-suite-basic-and-business-editions https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/new-pricing-f... This nets to ~45% price increase in just 3.5 years.
  - kweingar 4y ago
    Interestingly the new prices match inflation since April 2019 pretty closely ($6 then is $7.02 now, and the price is changing to $7.20).
    - eschulz 4y ago
      That's exactly what I was thinking. $5 to $7.20 in four years isn't ideal, but seems like so many other essential goods and services have increased at a much higher rate over that period of time.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- blibble 4y ago
  they had an annual plan previously then dumped it, effectively raising the price now they've raised the price again and have and brought the annual plan back as a "discount" (no doubt the annual plan will disappear again as another stealth price increase)
- locusm 4y ago
  When you move to an annual plan and then need to upgrade you will get charged a close out fee in addition to the extra plan cost. Yes, Google is charging you for the privilege of investing further in their platform. Google Partners have been able to provide annual plans for years.
wslh 4y ago
Inflation? Monopoly?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- aimkey 4y ago
  Lock in
  - CydeWeys 4y ago
    There's no lock in here. People are free to switch to one of the many competing services. It's not a monopoly under any reasonable definition of the term. Of course switching is going to have inertia, but that's not lock in. Lock in is when you are contractually obligated not to change, or if the monopoly is shutting down all competing services (perhaps by acquisition) so that there are no alternatives. For a good example of this type of lock in, just look at Ticketmaster.
    - benatkin 4y ago
      No refunds. So it's literally lock-in for a year. https://support.google.com/google-workspace-individual/answer/10758077?hl=en https://support.google.com/google-workspace-individual/answe... (for individual) https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2736362?hl=en https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2736362?hl=en (for Drive) - I don't see it for Admin but it's probably the same. Here's one for Google Workspace Admin: "The Annual Plan charges you for the exact number of licenses you signed up for through a yearly commitment." The "commitment" makes it sound non-refundable. https://support.google.com/a/answer/1230658?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/answer/1230658?hl=en
      - CydeWeys 4y ago
        If you contract for services for a year, and pay for that year up front at a discounted rate, why would you expect a refund if you unilaterally terminate the contract partway through? Just wait until the contract is up to switch services. You already paid for those months! If you're not sure you want to use the service for a full year then opt for the month-to-month contract.
candiddevmike 4y ago
What are you going to do, move to a different service? Switching out your cloud hosted office suite is probably a non starter for most companies.
- rconti 4y ago
  I just finally switched from a personal account to Workspace so I was a little concerned. Thankfully the price increase is minimal (and will be 0 since I can just pay annually).
- afandian 4y ago
  The lock-in is true. But it's still worrying.
- wcfields 4y ago
  It's a straight up nightmare to move email providers. Especially if you have an office environment built around GDocs, Gmail and trying to get people to move to Office365.
  - acdha 4y ago
    Email is by far the easiest of those things. Docs & workflows aren’t as standard so it’s not just an import but also changing how you work.
- xoa 4y ago
  >What are you going to do, move to a different service? Probably yes for a few of my clients. They're only using the email and calendars, and only via applications (Mac/iOS Mail/Calendar, Outlook, or TB). Two of them started on the free one. Primarily staying with GSuite has been a matter of inertia and ensuring delivery, all the other stuff is worthless. This will probably be motivation to make the move this time. Other companies might have kept and "basics only tier", but I just don't think Google is serious about anything but ads when it comes to money. Even their subscription stuff seems frequently poorly supported, though perhaps it's better for the biggest players. I'm very thankful I always pushed hard against webmail, had registrar/DNS independent and so on. It's added friction in some cases but means switching is pretty transparent. Lots don't have that luxury of course, but it's been nice here.
sarangab 4y ago
We switched from Google to Zoho Workspace last year once they threatened to stop support to the "legacy" users. Comparable service and much less expensive.
- JamesAdir 4y ago
  +1 for Zoho. They offer a all the services needed at a very convenient pricing.
  - CSMastermind 4y ago
    And because of this HN thread I will now be looking into Zoho to see if it's viable for me to migrate to.
    - trvz 4y ago
      - https://techmonitor.ai/technology/cybersecurity/zoho-hack-emmisary-panda-apt-china https://techmonitor.ai/technology/cybersecurity/zoho-hack-em... - https://www.zdnet.com/article/red-cross-traces-hack-back-to-zoho-vulnerability/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/red-cross-traces-hack-back-to-... - https://cybernews.com/news/fintech-breach-following-critical-zoho-flaw/ https://cybernews.com/news/fintech-breach-following-critical... - https://therecord.media/hackers-exploiting-vulnerability-affecting-zoho-manageengine-products-rapid7/ https://therecord.media/hackers-exploiting-vulnerability-aff...
      - JoBrad 4y ago
        Exactly. Zoho offers a slick UI but has a pretty bad record of keeping their products stable and secure.
  - iamjkt 4y ago
    The pricing is good, but the experience for mail is poor. I move from Zoho to Fastmail a year later and it’s a much slicker experience. (Just mail, I didn’t use any of Zoho’s collaborative tools.)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
metadat 4y ago
$20/mo still isn't bad for unlimited storage. Do any other providers come close to this price point? I wish I could prepay for the next 10 years to lock in at this price. How much does a petabyte of redundant hard drive storage cost? Yeah.. will probably still be more than $2,500 USD in 10 years.
- flatiron 4y ago
  I have 80TB on a $20 a month account. Hope they don’t either kick me off or bump it too much.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - metadat 4y ago
    Word on the street is they offered it because their DCs are so overprovisioned on storage that it doesn't really matter. Time will reveal whether or not this is true. As a sidenote, I'm disappointed by how slowly HDD capacity has been increasing the last few years. 100MB -> 1GB: 10x Was amazing 5GB -> 20GB: 4x Amazing 40GB -> 250GB: Hell yeah! ... Nowadays the rate of increase is way down. 10TB -> 20TB: 0.5x meh. In the next 5 years we _might_ get a 30TB drive? Yawn.
- esalman 4y ago
  I don't think there's an option to even pay for one year right now. It at least was the case last year when they pulled the plug on free tier and I had reluctantly give them credit card information for essentially a one person company.
  - joecool1029 4y ago
    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.
notatoad 4y ago
if they could only make their chat worthwhile this would be reasonable pricing. but as long as the decision is to pay for google workspace and slack, or else microsoft including teams, then microsoft seems like a better deal. i know teams gets a lot of hate, but it's at least usable.
- fragmede 4y ago
  What's missing from Google chat for you?
  - highclass 4y ago
    IMHO Google Chat is utter trash. I don't think normal people will be using a PWA for chat on desktop computers and like it. The lack of an option for a normal clean native client on desktops is astounding to me. reference) https://support.google.com/chat/answer/9455386?hl=en https://support.google.com/chat/answer/9455386?hl=en
joecool1029 4y ago
Thanks for the submission, we are resellers and the email they sent out was vague and didn't include a price sheet. We are very used to getting shit on at this point. Last week they stressed us out emailing us about a few users reaching resource limits and rather than name the customers they just sent a CSV with some Google internal customer_id we aren't privy to. A day later they corrected it using another faceless id that is at least on our billing statements.
thefounder 4y ago
I just went to Zoho after the "legacy" policy. It's just doesnt worth it. I need just an imap email service with custom domain name.
nunez 4y ago
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.
boneitis 4y ago
> Third, we are increasing the price of Google Workspace Enterprise Standard to reflect the value we’ve added to the edition [..] for large enterprises. But, they can't tell us by how much?
- atonse 4y ago
  It’s Whatever the enterprise can stomach.
  - boneitis 4y ago
    Fair point. When it's not even listed on their pricing chart in the first place, I guess there's likely some negotiation factor, as suggested in another comment.
mrbonner 4y ago
It is time for me to evaluate my custom domain email service. I had the original/free Google workspace with custom email domain. In 2021, they charged me $6/month to keep that option afloat. To be honest, I think $6/month is a bit expensive for just email usage. I don't even use any other stuff coming with Suite. My question for this group: how do I get out of this without losing my email domain?
- ktross 4y ago
  You could sign up for fastmail and point your domains DNS records there. It's $5/mo and they make it easy to import your existing emails from gmail. I switched to them when Google stopped offering free workspace accounts. It's been great so far.
  - georgemcbay 4y ago
    I also switched to fastmail with my own domain and also have had a great experience with it. It was super simple to import my data over from google and it's all still there and searchable. For me it wasn't really anything to do with the cost, just a token decision to opt out of the google hegemony over email to some degree. Been well over a year at this point and I don't miss gmail at all.
- chambo622 4y ago
  It was possible to opt into a continued free plan for legacy free G Suite users. Not sure if you lost that option by upgrading to a paid plan.
- bl4ckneon 4y ago
  Zoho is a good option if it's just you and you want a custom domain for your email. Used them for a few years without needing to pay. Moved over to proton mail (paid) for my email now, it comes with cloud storage, calandar, and VPN too. You also get simpleLogin included, a mail forwarding service for your custom domain names so you can make burner email addresses if you want.
  - 4y ago
thomaslord 4y ago
My company was forced to move from our previous G Suite plan to Google Workspace. In order to keep the same monthly price, we went with Business Starter. Now each user can only share a Google Doc with 5 non-Google users per month. This limitation seems entirely artificial and designed entirely to push people onto more expensive plans.
- troupe 4y ago
  Similar here. We are starting to consider 0365 since, depending on what features you use, it can be a less expensive for more functionality.
prepend 4y ago
For monthly, saas, products why would the price increase “to reflect value added to our products” since it’s a recurring fee it should always pay for new features to be added. It’s sad to see the “digital magic economies” of software slowly transform to normal commodity slow price increases to support brands and locked in markets. I guess it will be a race to suck between Office and Google. I hope an innovator comes along and provides a software layer on top of cloud storage like Dropbox (that isn’t tied to a particular storage like Dropbox is). Software should cost $100/year for your entire life.
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  > For monthly, saas, products why would the price increase “to reflect value added to our products” since it’s a recurring fee it should always pay for new features to be added. Without commenting on the specific of Google Workspace, in general, this makes sense if you’ve added a bunch of additional value. In fact, ironically, Slack’s antitrust complaint against MS re: Teams is precisely the fact that they bundled all this additional functionality in without charging extra for it.
  - xahrepap 4y ago
    I think what your parent is saying (at least how I read it) is in the context of comparing it to boxed software. I buy MS Word 1995 for $100. Then they release added value and box it up as MS Word 1998 for $100. Then they release added value and box it up as MS Word 2000 for $100. Now we pay $10/mo. If you average it out, it's not too different than just paying for the added value as it grows. And worse, if I cancel I don't keep to keep using it without the added value. So I'm painted in a corner. It's objectively worse in that sense.
    - warkdarrior 4y ago
      You also pay for hosting of that software service (availability, security, etc.).
      - 4y ago
dotBen 4y ago
Even at twice the price, the value of the collective Google Workspaces suite for most people is a no brainer. I pay more per month to the calendar scheduling SaaS provider I use than I do to Google - who provide the calendar plus email, drive, docs, meet, etc. An important lesson here for founders is price anchoring. Google is in a tough place because the prices are anchored to historically low amounts - they're increasing them by $1/m because that's about all they can do and the talk of 'all the next value' is their best attempt to break out of that anchor. If they were to bring this suite to the market today, I bet it would start at the $20/m mark.
- MisterPea 4y ago
  Why pay so much for a calendar scheduling service?
  - btian 4y ago
    Probably because G Workspace is comically cheap.
    - MisterPea 4y ago
      The whole industry of calendar scheduling boggles my mind. It seems Google/Microsoft consider them small fish to fry, but Calendly is a multi-billion dollar company
      - minhazm 4y ago
        Calendly is useful for scheduling meetings with people outside of your company. For meetings inside of your company Outlook and Google Calendar already have built in scheduling tools to help find a time that works for everyone. Even then Outlook does have FindTime and has a plugin system to let you use third party tools like Calendly. There's also a product called Microsoft Bookings that's more of a direct competitor to Calendly. But at the end of the day Calendly's revenue is estimated at around $100 million from what I could find online and that's a drop in the bucket for Microsoft or Google.
ehPReth 4y ago
Oh darn. Anyone have any insight as to how much the "Enterprise" levels increasing assuming base cost no negotiated discounts?
sschueller 4y ago
I'm done, first they force all previously grandfathered accounts to pay and now they are increasing the price less than a few months later. Additionally if a legacy user that had extra storage accidentally lets the renewal lapse you can not repurchase it, you are forced to upgrade all users to a higher tier at a ridiculous cost. I'm giving Tutanota a try and use other self hosted services for photos and drive.
thehappypm 4y ago
Thread A: I hate ads. Can’t I just pay for web sites? Thread B: WTF, I have to pay for a web site?
- ketralnis 4y ago
  Weird, so different people want different things?
thecrumb 4y ago
Problem with Google Workspace is it's still (!) disconnected from Google and a lot of things don't work like they do with a traditional @gmail account. I run into this all the time and it's so frustrating.
- alberth 4y ago
  Can you give an example.
locusm 4y ago
Something else to keep in mind when using Google Apps is Google will charge you a close out fee if youre on an annual plan and want to upgrade. Most customers find themselves wanting to do this upon reaching max mailbox size and it cant be done from the admin panel.
6451937099 4y ago
[dead]
6451937099 4y ago
[dead]
jerrac 4y ago
Makes me wonder, at what point will people start self hosting again, instead of getting dragged around by large companies like Google and Microsoft? I manage my own email server for myself and family. That, plus Next cloud gives me everything I'd need from Google/etc. Plus I host a few extra sites and services that GSuite/365 can't replicate. I'm fairly confident I could scale to a few hundred users if I took it seriously. Even more if I had someone else as a backup. The reliance on vendors and sass products for everything kinda baffles me.
nexxer 4y ago
Steve Holt!

164 points by lightwin 4y ago

It looks like you need to pay for a full year upfront to keep the legacy pricing. The month to month payment plans are seeing a price increase.

jefftk 4y ago

Up 20%: Starter: $6 -> $7.20 Standard: $12 -> $14.40 Plus: $18 -> $21.60 They are also introducing an annual payment option where you can pay the old per-month prices ($6, $12, $18).

alberth 4y ago
Let's not forget that just 3.5 years ago, prices were increase by 20% then as well. Starter: $5 -> $6 Standard: $10 -> $12 https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/new-pricing-for-g-suite-basic-and-business-editions https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/new-pricing-f... This nets to ~45% price increase in just 3.5 years.
- kweingar 4y ago
  Interestingly the new prices match inflation since April 2019 pretty closely ($6 then is $7.02 now, and the price is changing to $7.20).
  - eschulz 4y ago
    That's exactly what I was thinking. $5 to $7.20 in four years isn't ideal, but seems like so many other essential goods and services have increased at a much higher rate over that period of time.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
blibble 4y ago
they had an annual plan previously then dumped it, effectively raising the price now they've raised the price again and have and brought the annual plan back as a "discount" (no doubt the annual plan will disappear again as another stealth price increase)
locusm 4y ago
When you move to an annual plan and then need to upgrade you will get charged a close out fee in addition to the extra plan cost. Yes, Google is charging you for the privilege of investing further in their platform. Google Partners have been able to provide annual plans for years.

wslh 4y ago

Inflation? Monopoly?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
aimkey 4y ago
Lock in
- CydeWeys 4y ago
  There's no lock in here. People are free to switch to one of the many competing services. It's not a monopoly under any reasonable definition of the term. Of course switching is going to have inertia, but that's not lock in. Lock in is when you are contractually obligated not to change, or if the monopoly is shutting down all competing services (perhaps by acquisition) so that there are no alternatives. For a good example of this type of lock in, just look at Ticketmaster.
  - benatkin 4y ago
    No refunds. So it's literally lock-in for a year. https://support.google.com/google-workspace-individual/answer/10758077?hl=en https://support.google.com/google-workspace-individual/answe... (for individual) https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2736362?hl=en https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2736362?hl=en (for Drive) - I don't see it for Admin but it's probably the same. Here's one for Google Workspace Admin: "The Annual Plan charges you for the exact number of licenses you signed up for through a yearly commitment." The "commitment" makes it sound non-refundable. https://support.google.com/a/answer/1230658?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/answer/1230658?hl=en
    - CydeWeys 4y ago
      If you contract for services for a year, and pay for that year up front at a discounted rate, why would you expect a refund if you unilaterally terminate the contract partway through? Just wait until the contract is up to switch services. You already paid for those months! If you're not sure you want to use the service for a full year then opt for the month-to-month contract.

candiddevmike 4y ago

What are you going to do, move to a different service? Switching out your cloud hosted office suite is probably a non starter for most companies.

rconti 4y ago
I just finally switched from a personal account to Workspace so I was a little concerned. Thankfully the price increase is minimal (and will be 0 since I can just pay annually).
afandian 4y ago
The lock-in is true. But it's still worrying.
wcfields 4y ago
It's a straight up nightmare to move email providers. Especially if you have an office environment built around GDocs, Gmail and trying to get people to move to Office365.
- acdha 4y ago
  Email is by far the easiest of those things. Docs & workflows aren’t as standard so it’s not just an import but also changing how you work.
xoa 4y ago
>What are you going to do, move to a different service? Probably yes for a few of my clients. They're only using the email and calendars, and only via applications (Mac/iOS Mail/Calendar, Outlook, or TB). Two of them started on the free one. Primarily staying with GSuite has been a matter of inertia and ensuring delivery, all the other stuff is worthless. This will probably be motivation to make the move this time. Other companies might have kept and "basics only tier", but I just don't think Google is serious about anything but ads when it comes to money. Even their subscription stuff seems frequently poorly supported, though perhaps it's better for the biggest players. I'm very thankful I always pushed hard against webmail, had registrar/DNS independent and so on. It's added friction in some cases but means switching is pretty transparent. Lots don't have that luxury of course, but it's been nice here.

sarangab 4y ago

We switched from Google to Zoho Workspace last year once they threatened to stop support to the "legacy" users. Comparable service and much less expensive.

JamesAdir 4y ago
+1 for Zoho. They offer a all the services needed at a very convenient pricing.
- CSMastermind 4y ago
  And because of this HN thread I will now be looking into Zoho to see if it's viable for me to migrate to.
  - trvz 4y ago
    - https://techmonitor.ai/technology/cybersecurity/zoho-hack-emmisary-panda-apt-china https://techmonitor.ai/technology/cybersecurity/zoho-hack-em... - https://www.zdnet.com/article/red-cross-traces-hack-back-to-zoho-vulnerability/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/red-cross-traces-hack-back-to-... - https://cybernews.com/news/fintech-breach-following-critical-zoho-flaw/ https://cybernews.com/news/fintech-breach-following-critical... - https://therecord.media/hackers-exploiting-vulnerability-affecting-zoho-manageengine-products-rapid7/ https://therecord.media/hackers-exploiting-vulnerability-aff...
    - JoBrad 4y ago
      Exactly. Zoho offers a slick UI but has a pretty bad record of keeping their products stable and secure.
- iamjkt 4y ago
  The pricing is good, but the experience for mail is poor. I move from Zoho to Fastmail a year later and it’s a much slicker experience. (Just mail, I didn’t use any of Zoho’s collaborative tools.)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

metadat 4y ago

$20/mo still isn't bad for unlimited storage. Do any other providers come close to this price point? I wish I could prepay for the next 10 years to lock in at this price. How much does a petabyte of redundant hard drive storage cost? Yeah.. will probably still be more than $2,500 USD in 10 years.

flatiron 4y ago
I have 80TB on a $20 a month account. Hope they don’t either kick me off or bump it too much.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- metadat 4y ago
  Word on the street is they offered it because their DCs are so overprovisioned on storage that it doesn't really matter. Time will reveal whether or not this is true. As a sidenote, I'm disappointed by how slowly HDD capacity has been increasing the last few years. 100MB -> 1GB: 10x Was amazing 5GB -> 20GB: 4x Amazing 40GB -> 250GB: Hell yeah! ... Nowadays the rate of increase is way down. 10TB -> 20TB: 0.5x meh. In the next 5 years we _might_ get a 30TB drive? Yawn.
esalman 4y ago
I don't think there's an option to even pay for one year right now. It at least was the case last year when they pulled the plug on free tier and I had reluctantly give them credit card information for essentially a one person company.
- joecool1029 4y ago
  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.

notatoad 4y ago

if they could only make their chat worthwhile this would be reasonable pricing. but as long as the decision is to pay for google workspace and slack, or else microsoft including teams, then microsoft seems like a better deal. i know teams gets a lot of hate, but it's at least usable.

fragmede 4y ago
What's missing from Google chat for you?
- highclass 4y ago
  IMHO Google Chat is utter trash. I don't think normal people will be using a PWA for chat on desktop computers and like it. The lack of an option for a normal clean native client on desktops is astounding to me. reference) https://support.google.com/chat/answer/9455386?hl=en https://support.google.com/chat/answer/9455386?hl=en

joecool1029 4y ago

Thanks for the submission, we are resellers and the email they sent out was vague and didn't include a price sheet. We are very used to getting shit on at this point. Last week they stressed us out emailing us about a few users reaching resource limits and rather than name the customers they just sent a CSV with some Google internal customer_id we aren't privy to. A day later they corrected it using another faceless id that is at least on our billing statements.

thefounder 4y ago

I just went to Zoho after the "legacy" policy. It's just doesnt worth it. I need just an imap email service with custom domain name.

nunez 4y ago

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.

boneitis 4y ago

> Third, we are increasing the price of Google Workspace Enterprise Standard to reflect the value we’ve added to the edition [..] for large enterprises. But, they can't tell us by how much?

atonse 4y ago
It’s Whatever the enterprise can stomach.
- boneitis 4y ago
  Fair point. When it's not even listed on their pricing chart in the first place, I guess there's likely some negotiation factor, as suggested in another comment.

mrbonner 4y ago

It is time for me to evaluate my custom domain email service. I had the original/free Google workspace with custom email domain. In 2021, they charged me $6/month to keep that option afloat. To be honest, I think $6/month is a bit expensive for just email usage. I don't even use any other stuff coming with Suite. My question for this group: how do I get out of this without losing my email domain?

ktross 4y ago
You could sign up for fastmail and point your domains DNS records there. It's $5/mo and they make it easy to import your existing emails from gmail. I switched to them when Google stopped offering free workspace accounts. It's been great so far.
- georgemcbay 4y ago
  I also switched to fastmail with my own domain and also have had a great experience with it. It was super simple to import my data over from google and it's all still there and searchable. For me it wasn't really anything to do with the cost, just a token decision to opt out of the google hegemony over email to some degree. Been well over a year at this point and I don't miss gmail at all.
chambo622 4y ago
It was possible to opt into a continued free plan for legacy free G Suite users. Not sure if you lost that option by upgrading to a paid plan.
bl4ckneon 4y ago
Zoho is a good option if it's just you and you want a custom domain for your email. Used them for a few years without needing to pay. Moved over to proton mail (paid) for my email now, it comes with cloud storage, calandar, and VPN too. You also get simpleLogin included, a mail forwarding service for your custom domain names so you can make burner email addresses if you want.
- 4y ago

thomaslord 4y ago

My company was forced to move from our previous G Suite plan to Google Workspace. In order to keep the same monthly price, we went with Business Starter. Now each user can only share a Google Doc with 5 non-Google users per month. This limitation seems entirely artificial and designed entirely to push people onto more expensive plans.

troupe 4y ago
Similar here. We are starting to consider 0365 since, depending on what features you use, it can be a less expensive for more functionality.

prepend 4y ago

For monthly, saas, products why would the price increase “to reflect value added to our products” since it’s a recurring fee it should always pay for new features to be added. It’s sad to see the “digital magic economies” of software slowly transform to normal commodity slow price increases to support brands and locked in markets. I guess it will be a race to suck between Office and Google. I hope an innovator comes along and provides a software layer on top of cloud storage like Dropbox (that isn’t tied to a particular storage like Dropbox is). Software should cost $100/year for your entire life.

rhaway84773 4y ago
> For monthly, saas, products why would the price increase “to reflect value added to our products” since it’s a recurring fee it should always pay for new features to be added. Without commenting on the specific of Google Workspace, in general, this makes sense if you’ve added a bunch of additional value. In fact, ironically, Slack’s antitrust complaint against MS re: Teams is precisely the fact that they bundled all this additional functionality in without charging extra for it.
- xahrepap 4y ago
  I think what your parent is saying (at least how I read it) is in the context of comparing it to boxed software. I buy MS Word 1995 for $100. Then they release added value and box it up as MS Word 1998 for $100. Then they release added value and box it up as MS Word 2000 for $100. Now we pay $10/mo. If you average it out, it's not too different than just paying for the added value as it grows. And worse, if I cancel I don't keep to keep using it without the added value. So I'm painted in a corner. It's objectively worse in that sense.
  - warkdarrior 4y ago
    You also pay for hosting of that software service (availability, security, etc.).
    - 4y ago

dotBen 4y ago

Even at twice the price, the value of the collective Google Workspaces suite for most people is a no brainer. I pay more per month to the calendar scheduling SaaS provider I use than I do to Google - who provide the calendar plus email, drive, docs, meet, etc. An important lesson here for founders is price anchoring. Google is in a tough place because the prices are anchored to historically low amounts - they're increasing them by $1/m because that's about all they can do and the talk of 'all the next value' is their best attempt to break out of that anchor. If they were to bring this suite to the market today, I bet it would start at the $20/m mark.

MisterPea 4y ago
Why pay so much for a calendar scheduling service?
- btian 4y ago
  Probably because G Workspace is comically cheap.
  - MisterPea 4y ago
    The whole industry of calendar scheduling boggles my mind. It seems Google/Microsoft consider them small fish to fry, but Calendly is a multi-billion dollar company
    - minhazm 4y ago
      Calendly is useful for scheduling meetings with people outside of your company. For meetings inside of your company Outlook and Google Calendar already have built in scheduling tools to help find a time that works for everyone. Even then Outlook does have FindTime and has a plugin system to let you use third party tools like Calendly. There's also a product called Microsoft Bookings that's more of a direct competitor to Calendly. But at the end of the day Calendly's revenue is estimated at around $100 million from what I could find online and that's a drop in the bucket for Microsoft or Google.

ehPReth 4y ago

Oh darn. Anyone have any insight as to how much the "Enterprise" levels increasing assuming base cost no negotiated discounts?

sschueller 4y ago

I'm done, first they force all previously grandfathered accounts to pay and now they are increasing the price less than a few months later. Additionally if a legacy user that had extra storage accidentally lets the renewal lapse you can not repurchase it, you are forced to upgrade all users to a higher tier at a ridiculous cost. I'm giving Tutanota a try and use other self hosted services for photos and drive.

thehappypm 4y ago

Thread A: I hate ads. Can’t I just pay for web sites? Thread B: WTF, I have to pay for a web site?

ketralnis 4y ago
Weird, so different people want different things?

thecrumb 4y ago

Problem with Google Workspace is it's still (!) disconnected from Google and a lot of things don't work like they do with a traditional @gmail account. I run into this all the time and it's so frustrating.

alberth 4y ago
Can you give an example.

locusm 4y ago

Something else to keep in mind when using Google Apps is Google will charge you a close out fee if youre on an annual plan and want to upgrade. Most customers find themselves wanting to do this upon reaching max mailbox size and it cant be done from the admin panel.

6451937099 4y ago

[dead]

6451937099 4y ago

[dead]

jerrac 4y ago

Makes me wonder, at what point will people start self hosting again, instead of getting dragged around by large companies like Google and Microsoft? I manage my own email server for myself and family. That, plus Next cloud gives me everything I'd need from Google/etc. Plus I host a few extra sites and services that GSuite/365 can't replicate. I'm fairly confident I could scale to a few hundred users if I took it seriously. Even more if I had someone else as a backup. The reliance on vendors and sass products for everything kinda baffles me.

nexxer 4y ago

Steve Holt!