

How to get free single-user Google Apps accounts - nathanhammond
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/google-appengine/pVZfdeky-ow/TO1SmipM2Y0J

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josteink
I'm glad I signed up early. I have 11 users now, for $0, and I still think my
limit is 25.

That said, $50 a year is not really that much considering the service
provided.

~~~
JagMicker
$50 per user per year (or $5/user/month) _is_ a lot of money when you're just
starting a business, and especially if you weren't planning on having to spend
that money. Just in time for Christmas...

Now I have to contact all of the people I've sent proposals to, telling them
that the "free email service through Google Apps" I promised them is no longer
free. Google should have told us Apps Resellers, or, at the least, they should
give us an opportunity to create a few more free Apps accounts for clients
we've been pitching their product to. Not every business starts out with a
need for >10 users. Google has been telling their Apps Resellers to get people
'hooked' on the free version of Apps, then migrate them to the paid offering.
Now what?

~~~
yebyen
Sorry. If your business is built on marking up and reselling free things, I
can't feel sorry for you. That was one of those reflex apologies. Not a real
apology.

If your clients have waited until 2 weeks before Christmas to sign, then they
are actually the bad guys and they deserve to pay more. When exactly are you
supposed to do your gift shopping?

~~~
rprasad
Heavens forbid that someone try to make a living providing cost-efficient
technical solutions like a website and email to non-tech-saavy small
businesses!

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yebyen
Cry me a river! Cost-efficient != free electricity and high-availability
networking. I'm sure it was great while it lasted. Google have not actively
shut anybody down.

If you want efficiency, buy low power machines and cobble together what
services you need with free software. You can have RoundCube up and running in
a matter of a few hours. I don't know any other webmail providers that provide
SMTP, POP3, and IMAP for free. Those are all value-adds.

How much do you think that's worth? Would you include free support and
maintenance if they were your machines and the setup charge did not fully pay
for them? Do you think that it would be sustainable to do that?

Have you heard that it takes money to make money? If these businesses wanted
to grow past 25 employees, they had to be prepared to move to a paying plan
anyway. Those of us who were grandfathered in have obviously dodged a bullet.
I can tell you that I've run mail servers on small machines for groups of
users ~=25 before, and it's not very hard, but today I have free hosted Google
Apps and therefore I want no part in it anymore.

Thanks, Google!

~~~
yebyen
(For the record, I am running my own mail server, but I'm not currently
accepting applications for new accounts. I will be sad when I want to grow
past 25 users if it means I need to start paying $5/mo for each of them,
because I never learned to scale on my own.)

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aclimatt
This is good news, because I feel that Google has always ignored a very
legitimate use case of Google Apps -- wanting your own personal Google Account
with your own email address.

Many people, myself included, want to use all of the personal services that
Google provides backed by their own domain, not Gmail. You used to be able to
do this sans hosted email, but that feature got removed a year or two back. If
you wanted to use your own domain, you had to sign up for an entire Apps
account, when it really should have been the same as before + some MX records
for hosted email.

Perhaps using your own domain for a Google Account should be a paid service
anyway, and $50/year isn't incredibly pricey. But a 99.9% uptime SLA and phone
support aren't necessary for what can really be just a vanity. (That said,
phone support in Google's ecosystem is kind of nice...)

~~~
RobotCaleb
Being a Google Apps user so that I could have it all at my own domain really
made me feel like a forgotten stepchild. When the G1 came out I couldn't
properly use it as you couldn't make purchases using a GAFYD account. I forget
all of the things I ran into where Google wasn't compatible with itself due to
me being a GAFYD user.

~~~
aclimatt
Oh absolutely. I had a laundry list of the things that were supported on Apps
months after everybody else. We've always been second-class citizens, and now
everybody new is required to pay. I hope the trend doesn't continue.

There was App Engine, there was Google+, there was Android, there was Voice,
and a long host of others.

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g-garron
Matt Jaggard said on that Google discussion:

    
    
        - "I think you're missing the point. Some startups are getting going with zero capital because an individual with some skills and some time can produce and sell a product using free cloud services and then once they've made a few bob can upgrade.
    
        - Google WERE supporting this model very well - shame on you for stopping."
    

Maybe, Google may continue to offer this services to start ups. They can ask
for 0.05 or less share per startup using their services for free. That will
not be free anymore, but is a viable model. I think.

~~~
patrickaljord
> \- Google WERE supporting this model very well - shame on you for stopping."

This is ridiculous, besides the absurd sense of entitlement, it's only
$50/year. People who build startups spend more on their lattes or phone
subscription in a month. Come on.

~~~
stickfigure
Not that I disagree with you in general, but there are a lot of entrepreneurs
for whom $50/year is a major impediment.

When App Engine had its major round of price increases a year or two ago, a
number of small developers in Africa and India complained on the mailing list.
Apparently the nearly-free service of GAE was supporting a number of
entrepreneurs who live a _very_ different life from the typical bay area
startup groupie.

~~~
patrickaljord
I lived in Peru for 5 years, everyone who has the skills to write GAE or rails
apps there all have very well paid outsourced jobs working for companies from
the US or Spain. $50 is absolutely no problems for them, it's not a problem
either for the local growing middle class in Peru or even India and Africa.
Most people who had enough education to be able to write GAE apps are from the
middle class or already have well paid jobs.

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tedchs
More details in Google's blog post:
[http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2012/12/changes-to-
goog...](http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2012/12/changes-to-google-apps-
for-businesses.html)

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eunice
Again, people are missing this: Google apps 'free' & even regular gmail have
never been truly free. Anything you put in there is sold off to the ad
partners. It has never been a charity.

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martinced
It's too soon IMHO.

I've set up Google Apps for Business / Domains for so many SMEs and this thing
is definitely cutting the Office grass under a certain competitor's feet. I'm
not saying said competitor is not enjoying amazing revenues: all I'm saying is
Google _is_ hurting other office suites sales with Google Apps for Domains.

People are delighted with this "free" solution. Now I'm going to have to bill
them at least $50 / user per year and they'll start thinking about buying
Office from another competitor again.

I understand Google needing to make money with this, but IMHO it's way too
soon. They should have waited to "bait" way more SMEs into their net before
doing such a move.

~~~
evanmoran
This is a really important point. Google owned the default position for me in
setting up domain email for people. Their service is great and using it for a
business was a pretty easy call. Most of these folks wouldn't have ever even
tried google docs without their domain being tied to it. It is win win for
google.

Now its all changed. $50 per user isn't a huge amount but it is more then
zero. Google has taken the default choice for many people and made us rethink
it. It can only work poorly for them.

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Alaskan005
Until they disable them again? Save yourself some time and aggravation. Either
pony up or find a more reliable provider.

~~~
daeken
At $50/year, ponying up is an absolute no-brainer. ~$4/month? That's
effectively free.

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vidyesh
Its $50/user/year.

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daeken
Yes, but we're talking about single-user accounts.

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vidyesh
If just single-user account then well its better to use the workaround and get
it till it works for free.

