
Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups - antichaos
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2012/12/changes-to-google-apps-for-businesses.html
======
zmmmmm
I really hate it when companies try to sugar coat a decision that is _all_
downside for their customers. It may be really hard to do, but Google should
just come out and say it: _there is no upside for this to anyone except
Google_. It is not about giving you a _better experience_ or making things
more _straightforward_. It is _all_ about Google deciding to maximize their
profits at the expense of their users. That's fine, it's what businesses
(ultimately) do (even the ones that pretend they put their users first).
Google should just say it - they no longer want to support a free version of
their product because they can make more money another way.

When I see ridiculous sugar coating it breeds distrust and disbelief -
congratulations Google, I now believe every single future thing you say a
little less, well done.

~~~
alanctgardner2
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 attempting to pursue a
global maxima: rather than making the best 'free-enterprise email/document
sharing/whatever else it does because I only use it for email', they're now
free to focus their efforts on paying customers. I suspect the one area where
this will impact the most is customer service; Google is traditionally
horrible because they're loathe to waste money on minimum wage call-centre
employees to support loss-leader products. Now that Apps for Domains will be a
first-class, revenue generating product, maybe they'll answer the damn phone.

~~~
indiecore
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.

~~~
jrockway
I used to run my own one-user email system. The hosting alone cost $240 a
year. And I had to spend a lot of time configuring exim4 (and spamassassin and
clam-av), figuring out which email indexer to use, setting up offlineimap,
running cron jobs to archive mailing lists, coercing a friend to run a
secondary MX for me, etc., etc. I didn't enjoy it all. And no matter what I
did to reduce spam, about 10 messages a day always made it through.

(And, when I was first doing this, someone trying to hire me for a job
couldn't email me, because their hosting provider was once friendly to
spammers and my aggressive blacklisting rejected their TCP connections. Oops.)

Running an email server is hard and very few people regret paying an expert to
do it for them.

(As many HN readers know, I work for Google. But I'm not telling you that you
should or should not use Google's product here, only that running an email
server is not trivial.)

~~~
wbillingsley
All you need is a forwarding service to forward the incoming mail to your
gmail account, as regular personal gmail can handle sending out email with a
different from address.

No exim4, no spamassassin, no clam-av, no figuring out which indexer to use,
or any of that. Just a forward on the incoming mail.

~~~
gfosco
I think most people would consider that cheating... You're hardly running your
own email server, and still using Google.

I actually miss running my own email domain, the privacy of it, not the actual
administration. I stopped when I had gotten so crazy with aliases and
disposable addresses that the spam overwhelmed me. Wasn't worth the time to
'do it right,' and I gave up my privacy for the simplicity of GMail.

I would love to leave GMail and take my privacy back, but I haven't found an
acceptable alternative yet.

~~~
white_devil
If you get a domain at Gandi.net, it comes with a free e-mail service for 5
accounts. You could see if that suits your needs.

~~~
sciurus
Seconding this; Gandi works well for me as a registrar, DNS provider, and
email provider.

There are many email providers you can use with your own domain. For example,
rackspace is $2 a user a month.
[https://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/rackspace_email...](https://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/rackspace_email/)
I'm not sure why people are jumping from "Google won't do this for free for me
anymore" to "I must do it myself".

------
dotBen
Contrarian view...

by offering <50 email accounts for free, Google essentially destroyed the
market for any other startups or companies to come into the market and offer
non-enterprise B2B email services... thus limiting competition and innovation.

One could argue that the removal of the free tier at this point is simply
because they've created an entrenched position, but one could also suggest
that this creates a modicum of opportunity for another player to try to enter
this space.

Certainly until today the $ size of the addressable market in the small
business email space was practically $0 given Google's position.

 _[discuss :)]_

~~~
dbuxton
Still, $50/user/year doesn't give you that much room for manoeuvre as a
startup...

~~~
ams6110
Compared to what? You can provision your own apps and run your own services
for less?

~~~
rdl
I think he means as a vendor of mail services, $50/year/mailbox means you
can't make enough profit unless you're huge, and even mid-sized,
$50/year/mailbox might not let you provide very good service.

------
blhack
Huh. Just want to point out that one of the main reasons we're using google
apps at my company is that I use google apps for hosting my personal email.
When it came time to make a decision on that, and I am the one who makes that
decision, I chose google apps because it was already familiar to me.

Poor choice, imho. I'm curious what the actual overhead is for people like me.
I have 1 account (as in: 1 email address) that is hosted by google apps. I was
going to set up an account for one of my other domains, but not for $50/year.
(Per account!)

So full snark here, but it was between google apps, and office 365. I chose GA
because o my familiarity with it.

But look here, Microsoft's equivalent offering is free:
<https://domains.live.com/> I wonder what things will look like when we
evaluate google apps next year?

~~~
espeed
You can still get a free Standard Google Apps Account with one free email
address instead of 10.

See [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/google-
appengine/pVZfd...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/google-
appengine/pVZfdeky-ow/TO1SmipM2Y0J)

~~~
gst
Just created an account via this link and it doesn't look like the number of
users is limited to 1. Have my own user account and was able to create two
additional test accounts.

------
spankalee
As a Googler and for much longer, a Google Apps user for my family, this is
sad news.

I wish they had just fixed the experience for "vanity domains" so that they
didn't require all the enterprise features, and didn't let administrators have
complete control of users accounts. Then they could roll out new features to
vanity users without needing the enterprise controls.

I understand that this is a little tricky, and involves no paying customers,
but Google Apps was by far the best experience for custom domains. I'm sure it
attracted the type of influencers that pull even more users. I used it for my
family, bands, friends with very small businesses and more, and the other
people on those domains not already using Gmail, in turn migrated their
personal accounts to Gmail.

~~~
rgsteele
I completely agree with this. I signed up for Google Apps for the sole purpose
of having an email address at my own domain, and I always wished I could just
have that email address supported by my existing Gmail account, rather than
having to deal with the hassle of yet another account somewhere. I would
gladly have paid for that.

Google's always been pretty good about making sure you aren't locked in to
their services, likely due to the efforts of their Data Liberation Front[1],
but it always seemed to me that being locked in to using an @gmail.com email
address was a big exception to this.

[1] <http://www.dataliberation.org/>

~~~
spankalee
Yes, there's really two parts to a "vanity" domain: I want a nice looking
email address, and I want to own my email address no matter what service I
use. It's nice to be able to also use an awesome service like Gmail on top of
it.

It's worth some value to me, but $50/user/year is a bit much for a family of
~5 light email users.

~~~
ikailan
I think this is only for new customers, not existing ones.

~~~
taftster
Right, but we're talking about the (now current) pricing model. There are many
many many small family units that have not yet converted to "vanity" gmail.
Now they won't ever.

------
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

------
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...](http://www.omegaweb.com/2012/09/how-to-configure-a-custom-domain-with-
outlook-com/)

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.

~~~
18pfsmt
When I last looked, IMAP was not available on the free custom domains. Is that
still the case?

~~~
benaiah
IMAP is not, but the superior Exchange ActiveSync protocol is, through
m.outlook.com - despite the name, it's just Exchange, so it works anywhere.
See <http://help.outlook.com/en-gb/140/bb896613.aspx> for more details.

~~~
davidcollantes
"Superior", ha!

~~~
benaiah
Erm, yes, it is superior, as it has all the capability of IMAP and more. See
this:
[http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2007/07/10/34033...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2007/07/10/3403386.aspx).

------
revelation
Not sure how to feel about this. The core feature of the free Google Apps was
that you could use GMail with your own domain without having to run a
dedicated mail server yourself.

~~~
modeless
You can still use GMail with any domain:
[http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...](http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=21289&from=21288&rd=1)

This method is actually far more convenient than setting up Google Apps. You
can both send and receive mail at the other domain, and you get a unified
inbox (which Google Apps never provided).

~~~
agwa
No, that method requires that the other domain have its own mail server to
accept and store the mail until gmail comes and fetches it with POP. Who will
host that other server?

Google Apps for domains lets you point your domain's MX record directly at
Google, and Google accepts the mail for you.

~~~
modeless
The important part of Google Apps is the GMail interface, not the SMTP
service. SMTP hosting is easy to come by; most hosting services include it
with their web hosting packages.

------
stevoski
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
inconsequential amount for all but the most penny-pinching operation.

~~~
indiecore
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.

~~~
adrianm
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.

------
edj
I'm not sure if I'm parsing this correctly, but it sounds like people who use
Google Apps as an email backend for personal email on custom domains will now
have to pay $50/year.

If so, that's a huge bummer. I only recently switched to running my email this
way and I don't relish the thought of migrating elsewhere so soon.

I _would_ happily pay $50/year (or perhaps more... I don't know how high I'd
go) for email that's not only convenient and spam free, but also well
protected from governments and the provider's employees, and not data mined.

I have absolutely no use for phone support or 99.9 uptime for my personal
email. So the businessification of Google mail is not a win for me. Privacy
and convenience or what I'm after.

Anyone working on something like this?

~~~
digikata
I think you missed this sentence. "Please note this change has no impact on
our existing customers, including those using the free version." Still, I'm on
free google apps mostly for a personal email domain too and will likely start
considering alternatives just in case.

I'd also note that the $50/year is also per user, so there's sort of an
opening to offer a family, personal domain type service. For a family of a
maybe 2-6 users, the $50/year-user is a bit steep if you're mostly looking for
a small group email + calendaring. Maybe that would even be an interesting
vector for starting a new family-based social networking service.

~~~
edj
I did miss that. Thanks for pointing that out.

I actually considered an email address like firstname@lastname.com. I figured
I could add my parents, or future children.

But this only works for obscure last names or unusual TLDs. There's also the
issue of family relationships - people get divorced, grow up and want more
independence, etc. Marrying email to a family domain could be messy.

~~~
X-Istence
I do exactly that, bertjw@regeer.org. I've set up accounts for everyone else
in the family, but most if not all just have it set up as a forwarder to
another gmail account.

------
foxylad
I have no problem paying for a Google Apps account where I actually use Google
apps, but at the moment you have to have a Google Apps account to link a
domain to an Appengine app. Some of our apps have two or three domains showing
the same app, and because you need to have an account for each email address
that Appengine sends email from, we have three or four accounts (support,
noreply, accounts per domain.

So this move is going to add $600 per year to our costs - all for virtual
accounts that don't actually use Google Apps at all.

Hopefully this was unintended, and Google will continue to provide free
accounts for domains linked to Appengine apps - or provide another mechanism
for linking and authorising sending addresses.

~~~
callmevlad
From the post:

> Please note this change has no impact on our existing customers, including
> those using the free version.

~~~
X-Istence
He is specifically stating that as of right now if you want to use Google
AppEngine to send email you need to have a Google Apps account.

So after today (no more free accounts) if I want to set up example.com as a
domain to send email from on my Google AppEngine webapp, I will have to fork
over X amount of money a year to have those essentially non-existent users
that are valid mailboxes.

------
rajuvegesna
Google made a mistake initially by 1) Giving too much away for free and 2)
Charging too low. It is probably trying to correct these mistakes.

1) On giving too much away…

Remember, Google Apps started with 200 free users, later reduced it to 100,
then to 50, then to 10 and now to zero.

[http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/23/google-puts-the-squeeze-
on-...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/23/google-puts-the-squeeze-on-free-
apps/)

At 200 free users, there was no room for a new entrant in the market. I am
glad that didn't last long.

2) On Charging too low...

Back when they launched it, $50/user/year was extremely aggressive pricing.
Vendors were charging $50/month. May be Google is realizing they were charging
too low. I now see an additional plan with $10/user/month option (which didn't
exist earlier).

Disclaimer: I work for Zoho, competition to Google Apps.

~~~
cynix
> Remember, Google Apps started with 200 free users

And when Google Apps first started, you could request to increase the number
of free users. I have an old account with a quota of 500 free users.

------
amitagrawal
With this decision, I have now come to believe that Google is not the company
that it used to be in the past. The user-friendly company with a quirky
personality.

Somewhere in the mindless fighting with becoming the dominant social and
mobile force on the planet, it has forgotten about the very users it once
strived to please.

This has been more apparent since Larry took over Google as the CEO. His "more
wood behind fewer arrows" has somewhere down the line taken away the humor
with which Google has largely operated. 20% time? Google Labs? Hugely popular
Google products scrapped into oblivion.

The only products that matter beyond search are - Android, Google+, YouTube
and Google Apps which are fairly mature by now and are a serious threat to
competitors.

The thing is they didn't need to do it because they aren't starving of
computing resources for more important products and the marginal costs of
adding free users is almost nil (although it exists).

I somehow feel betrayed by this decision. Google, so far, has resisted the
temptation to shut down products that were important to it's users unlike
other companies like Microsoft and Yahoo! I have been using Google Apps since
they launched it a long ago. It feels like bait and switch.

This is completely right and there is nothing wrong with them shutting down a
free service as a business but somehow it feels so non-Googly.

------
gtt
On a related note could dear hn crowd suggest email provider (maybe paid, say
up to 30-40$ annually) caring about my privacy a little bit more? Really
delete my messages when I want to is a good start.

Google is all good but I feel I should not put all of my emails in one
account..

~~~
Tortoise
I've been using <https://www.fastmail.fm/> forever, nothing but good things to
say

~~~
egeozcan
I'm a very happy customer since years. Probably they have a good support too,
but I haven't had any problems so I don't know =)

------
6ren
Google believes the cloud/apps have enough providers now, so they aren't
needed to drive it.

Their strategy is to grow the web. This works because they make more money
from the web being used. It also makes people love Google, which is important
because switching search engines is easy. The love also helps in hiring.

However... they have introduced internal cost accounting, so that products
must pay their way - a little internal market. IMHO, this is potentially
dangerous, since there already is a market (the real one), and it ignores the
advantages of a firm (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm>)
But they don't follow it absolutely, e.g. android isn't paying its way. (NB:
Apple is focussed on making better products, not on growing the web).

If google can see that other firms are better placed to do a better job of
growing the web in some respect (or they can apply pressure on them to do so),
they are happy to step aside.

------
hmart
I'm from a SouthAmerican nation, here the IT budget of small business is
pretty limited and Google Apps (even with the 10 accounts limit) was a viable
option for them. Google will have to adapt the prices for non USA markets
(BRIC, EMEA, Latam) if they want to succeed. Also this movement bring space of
innovation for email.

------
nikcub
Google under Larry Page is obsessed with short-term revenue. They did the same
with AppEngine, Maps and now Apps.

Not to mention that I cringed throughout this announcement. They are doing it
because it benefits users? C'mon, just tell us you love the money, nothing
wrong with that.

~~~
jemeshsu
It might be a sign that advertising revenue is not growing as expected. My
guess.

------
chrisblackwell
This is really a logical step. If you are an individual and don't really see
the value in $50 a year, you can forward your own domain to your regular Gmail
account and set the reply to email address to whatever you want.

If you run a business and need the Google Apps platform, then $50 a year
really shouldn't be a barrier for you. If it is, time to rethink your business
priorities.

~~~
aidos
$50 / _user_ / year - still not insane but I know it's put people off in the
past.

~~~
Margh
Certainly puts me off. $5/10 per user per year, wouldn't think twice about it
(even though the money would be paid grudgingly). With the number of users we
have that would end up being around $50/year; but $500/year to host some email
and store spreadsheets? No thanks.

~~~
chrisblackwell
Let's imagine your company has 100 employees in it. So at $5/user a month, you
are paying $500 a month.

Now, the median salary for thos 100 employees is most likely at least $3000,
so you are paying them collectively $300,000 a month. That represents 0.016%
of their salary. Do you get where I'm going with this?

~~~
Margh
And when the median salary of your employees is $0/month (prototyping or a
family domain or something) and your options are: a. Nothing b.
$50/(employee/family member)

What then? Of course no company paying $300,000/month is going to care about
$50/user/year.

Edit: Clarification

------
zheng
Wow. Google Apps for Your Domain is a huge thing for a lot of hackers. I run
my entire family's email using it. Is google just giving up on supporting
custom domains? That would be a huge disruption for me =(

~~~
indiecore
I posted this below but I was really counting on Google Apps to set up a
custom domain email address. I'm just starting some stuff and it's still very
"free time" right now and I am really not going to spend 50 dollars a year on
it yet.

------
therealarmen
_Please note this change has no impact on our existing customers, including
those using the free version._

I give it six months before they start strong-arming free users into paid
accounts.

~~~
joahua
It's been nearly six years of free. That's pretty gradual strong-arming.

Note that per user limits continue to apply, so people have as much incentive
as they ever did to upgrade, plus for any new domains/projects people will
naturally either migrate to other options (then consolidate services around
these, moving themselves off Google) or start paying.

Not convinced there's any need for hostility on either side.

~~~
loceng
This is to kill the competition; At minimum to gain a competitive advantage.

------
speleding
The free Google Apps was perfect for families: give each kid a nice
kid@familyname.com and no problem with the silly 18 year limit that gmail has.
The shared calendars work great in our family too.

It's certainly not worth $50 per year because the little ones get maybe 1
email a month from grandma. Since Google does not allow kids on gmail, where
should families go now?

~~~
mokash
I never thought about using Google Apps like this. It actually sounds pretty
cool to be honest. If my whole family was using it, then I'd probably consider
paying $50/year for the service.

~~~
mcherm
But would you pay $50/family-member? (Which is presumably a significantly
bigger amount of money.)

~~~
brewdad
Exactly. I am in the same boat. I set up the family with individual,
personalized addresses and a series of calendars that can be shared between
all of us or just my wife and I. It's convenient, but not $200+/yr convenient.
For now, nothing changes but I guess it's time to start looking around for a
cheaper alternative should Google decide to kill off the free tier altogether.

------
confluence
So for hackers it's what? $50 a year for hosting + $10 a year of domain
registration for vanity URLs - that's $5 a month.

Don't see much of a problem here - I'm surprised they didn't do this sooner -
I'm happy to pay for this service at that price - no problem.

~~~
timv
Depends what you need to host. If you just want email & a blog, gandi.net will
providing hosting for those as part of their domain registration (~$15 per
year, depending on which TLD you want).

They also include minimal web hosting with registration too, but last I looked
their (free) offering was so bad it didn't really count as a feature.

I imagine some other domain registrars have similar options.

~~~
nicholassmith
I got a domain through gandi and decided to try my email there for a change,
it's been pretty reliable and solid, the only time I needed support it was
quick. I don't however do a lot of email so my experience might be much
different to a power email user.

------
jtbarrett
I have a free Google Apps account mostly so that I can have a custom domain
for my small (free) App Engine site:
<https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/domain>

It's sad that now attaching a custom domain will cost a lot more than the
domain itself.

~~~
Strom
You can still create a free Google Apps account, limited to a single user,
through App Engine [1], Google just doesn't want to advertise this fact to
everyone.

[1] - [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine/pVZfdeky-
ow...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine/pVZfdeky-
ow/TO1SmipM2Y0J)

~~~
j_s
Just wanted to say thanks so much for sharing this; kind of a big deal!

Now to figure out which email should be 'real' for Google App Engine - maybe
the 1 user will be 'noreply'!

~~~
mavhc
Just did this and was able to create 10 users

------
rdl
I gave up on Google Apps for your Domain for email a while ago (security,
bugs, and the general black box nature of the product).

Right now, my favorite solution is Kerio Connect, which you can either self-
host or purchase as a cloud solution. There are hosting providers who will
handle all of this for you, but having the option to bring mail fully in house
is really nice.

It's essentially Exchange, but much easier to manage, and far cheaper.

They also have a Sharepoint/Box alternative, Workspace, that I now love.

I'm more than happy paying $555 for a server and then $45/user for license,
$15/user/year maintenance, and hosting costs. I really don't think
$50-100/mo/user (once you factor in admin/hosting costs...you could do it for
$20-30/mo but $50-100 is a safer budget) is an unreasonable amount for top
quality email and collaboration tools.

------
tszming
This might be painful at the beginning but it could be a win-win situation in
_long term_ for most parties:

1\. Google: can focus on customer service, 2\. Google's share holders: more
revenue, 3\. Competitors: more competitive advantages, 4\. Startups: time to
disrupt, 5\. Users: Email should be decentralized, why rely on a single
provider is a good thing?

------
Steveism
This is unfortunate indeed. The free Google Apps offering was a substantial
value. What viable alternatives are there?

~~~
shuzchen
Seems most of the people recommending alternatives are only thinking of email.
I use gapps for my family, and we take a huge advantage of having a domain-
specific calender and docs.

~~~
galactus
What is the advantage of using domain-specific calendar/docs over using them
with your personal google account?

~~~
shuzchen
It's a lot easier to have your data be shared with the whole team. Otherwise,
with a personal google account, sharing a document with a team requires adding
each individual person to each document. There appears to be a feature of
adding a group to a document, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to
define groups, and even if it were possible it'd be a few extra steps to
manage as well as to keep track of, since the document overview only shows
"shared" but not the people/group it's shared with.

With a domain-specific account, it's easy to set a document to be shared with
the group - added benefit is if you add a new user to the domain, she is
automatically given access to those documents. Also, the document overview is
much easier to manage since anything marked "shared" usually means teamwide.

I get what you're saying, everything can be accomplished with the still free
personal google account, just it includes a constant daily drain on mental
processing power.

------
therandomguy
Oh come on... can we just have the gmail piece for free? If you want limit it
to 5 addresses so that only really poor hackers use free account and they
become your paying customers as soon as they find some traction.

------
4lun
Found a workaround to still sign up for the standard plan, modify the
following URL to include your domain:
[http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/standard/selectDomain?existin...](http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/standard/selectDomain?existingDomain=YOURDOMAIN.COM&newDomain=false&ownDomain=true)

Likely to be disabled very soon.

~~~
alexenko
Instead of giving you a free plan, it gives you a 30 day trial :(

~~~
4lun
Yep you're right, they just haven't gotten around to updating the copy on the
form.

------
alanctgardner2
I wonder if the cause of this is the support costs required for the free
accounts? Obviously personal GMail is plug-and-play, but for someone who can't
spell DNS, setting up a domain account was never quite drop-dead-simple
enough. I suspect the goal here is to create a barrier to entry and prevent
the inevitable support load of free users.

There was an excellent post about this a while ago, where a developer reported
much better treatment from users after charging a token fee for their app.

As a final thought, maybe Google is catching on to the 'charge what something
is worth, not what it costs you' way of thinking. Hosted email solutions for
enterprise aren't free, and it seems like Google has realized the real value
of their product. Also, ~$4/seat/month is pretty well in line with this kind
of SaaS offering.

~~~
georgemcbay
I doubt the support costs were very much. As with all things Google other than
being an adsense buyer, support was basically "send us an email and we'll
respond with a robo-faq that may or may not have anything to do with your
question".

And Google Apps was actually quite easy to setup, partly because Google
documented it pretty well but mostly because many DNS providers would
basically do a one-click Google Apps setup automatically for you.

~~~
lawdawg
Google Apps for Business has 24/7 _phone_ support. Maybe you would know that
if you actually used Google Apps for Business or read the blog post.

~~~
cynix
> Google Apps for Business has 24/7 phone support.

Not for the free version.

~~~
tytso
Given that there were people who would try to use the free version for their
business, and then kvetch (on HN and/or other major technology blogs) when
their account was hijacked and they lost business critical access and couldn't
recover quickly because they didn't have the 24/7 phone support, it might
actually be better that the free version is getting sunset....

------
z-factor
For people who just need email forwarding <https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/>
work great. They charge $0.02/forwarded domain/day. So ~7USD per year per
domain. I'm a customer for 5+ years, no complaints.

~~~
cwb71
Elephant killing and hideous website aside, GoDaddy forwards up to 100
addresses for free with domain registration.

------
mokash
I use Google Apps with my personal domain. A lot of people are recommending
alternatives but the main reason why I like Google Apps is that I can use it
to easily sign into YouTube, Google Docs and various other services that they
provide with my personal, official email address.

I use Google Apps for a small blog that I run and I gave out email addresses
to all of the writers. Eventually we had 11 writers and they only allow 10
free so I upgraded that one. People can't do that now. It's either all or
nothing.

Meh, their loss. May have to go with Microsoft's alternative or something.

------
philwelch
Any other decent, free IMAP hosts out there? Ever since the Gmail UI shit the
bed and mail clients grew an archive button I don't really need Google Apps
itself anymore anyway.

~~~
KNoureen
If you have the time for it, you could try a VPS and your own IMAP/SMTP-server
and web-interface.

I migrated off Google a year ago to my own server, took a day to sit down and
understand/configure it and have since then run smoothly w/o me touching it.
And since I host some other people's domains and mail for a small fee, I
actually earn a few $ / year.

~~~
philwelch
How bad is spam if you do that?

~~~
lgbr
I've done the same as him, and I just make sure I use spamassassin. It works
just as well or better than GMail at catching spam.

------
nvmc
I sorted out my gmail powered trendy n@me-lastname.net email not two weeks
ago. Perhaps if they offered a single user package free of charge it would be
more sustainable.

------
zsiddique
This might suck for the power user who had his own domain, but I am betting
the free version was abused by a lot of business unwilling to pay a few bucks
for the service.

~~~
Firehed
What's the difference? The cost to Google is presumably the same, except that
the user count might have been between two and ten-ish instead of one.

And now they can't upsell those businesses to paid accounts anymore.
Established businesses already have email in place, and switching them over
will be a hell of a sell.

------
tjbiddle
Wow, I actually _just_ called Google Apps support the other day for one of my
domains to get downgraded back to free G Apps (I had unintentionally signed up
for a 30-day trial of Business, and it didn't auto-downgrade, it just
suspended my account). Bummer to see this though, I have multiple domains (As
I'm sure many do here) and it's nice having a quick setup for one or two
@domain.com's.

------
TheYComb
I would even pay $50 a year if Google stopped making "improvements" to the UI.
The new composer looks nice at first but it slows me down when I need to use
different fonts, etc AND they removed background color AKA highlight. I do not
use Evernote just because they do not have highlight... and now they decided
to removed it from Gmail too. If it is not broken, don't fix it :-/

------
admiralpumpkin
In reading the comments generally I feel like there's two main groups being
affected here: small businesses and small groups (families, geeks, whatever).

The first group—small businesses—can of course afford $50/user/year, even if
they would rather not spend it.

The second group—enthusiasts—even if they could afford it, likely cannot
justify $50/user/year. I personally have a custom email hosted by Google for a
small group of my friends, and I know that there is NO WAY any of us would pay
$50 each per year. The price would need to be an order of magnitude lower for
us to consider it. (Yes, I know that for the moment we're grandfathered in.)

Seems like there should be a way for Google to distinguish between the two
groups based on services needed and then price two tiers accordingly. For
example, offer a Small Group Plan at $5/user/year with a limit of 10 users &
no phone support; and another Small Business Plan that offers up to 50 users,
limited phone support & whatever else help small businesses for a higher
price.

------
awicklander
Google decides to charge money for providing a valuable service. Crazy!

------
netfire
Seems like a strange move by Google. Most small or starting businesses don't
need a 25GB inbox (at least not every user) or 24/7 tech support. Why create
the barrier to entry? Now people with businesses will be more likely to use
personal Google accounts for business or look for alternative services. Why
not just create a premium business account option that gives you this level of
storage and support if you need it, instead of trying to convince your users
that they need it, when most of them are happy without it.

Personally, I liked the direction Google was heading with their Google Drive
product. You get up to 5GB for free and then pay for more if you need it.
Makes me wonder how Google might try to monetize other products like Google+
once they have a substantial following.

------
coopdog
I wonder how this will effect the Google Apps Marketplace
<https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/?pli=1>

At the very least there will be less potential customers now. I imagine some
people would have been willing to pay $0 to Google and $15 per user per month
for some kind of project management offering, now it's $65 per month, which is
really going to hurt new sign ups.

Also for anyone with an existing free account who wants to add new domains,
don't forget you can add domain alias's. So you keep the same account but just
make it so email from two+ different domains can come in. For tiny ideas that
always have the same 1-2 employees it's almost preferable to a whole new
account anyway.

------
redthrowaway
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.

~~~
ams6110
What's the "nines" of uptime on a typical corporate desktop? By my back of the
envelope calculations it's worse than 3.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I'll take "Google downtime" (a damn small amount) over any other sort of
downtime (Rackspace, AWS US-EAST-1, _the hardware on my desk_ ) any day of the
week.

~~~
janlukacs
Same here :)

------
wyck
Create a start-up with:

3 way email sync (mobile/web/desktop) like exchange server (or other
enterprise stuff)

A slick feature rich UI

Custom domains via MX

Solid spam filtering

 _There is nothing out there that does this for under 10$/month per user and I
think there is a solid market for a better price point._

~~~
stock_toaster

      > There is nothing out there that does this for under 10$/month per user and I think there is a solid market for a better price point.
    

You realize Google Apps is $50/yr (around $4.16 per month) per user, right?

------
cnaut
Office 365 is much cheaper now - [http://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/office365/compare-plans.aspx?...](http://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/office365/compare-plans.aspx?WT.z_O365_ca=Buy_online-software_en-us)

~~~
jarin
The cheapest plan (email/calendar/contacts) is only $4 cheaper per year than
Google Apps.

~~~
cnaut
You are right, I misread the pricing the first time. The prices are basically
the same now

------
tikhonj
Wow, now I feel _really_ lucky that I signed up for a free account just a
couple of weeks ago.

Then again, being forced to find my own email hosting would have made me less
dependent on Google, which may have been a good thing...

~~~
fakeer
Agree. I really think it's a bad idea to be tied to an ecosystem for all your
needs.

I, for one, would sure want to Keep all my chat contacts to some other service
than Google/Gmail, Calendar with an independent provider. Unfortunately,
unlike Calendar and some other services services like SNS and Chat are
dependent upon what and where your other friends are. I would love it if I can
have my own chat setup and I can chat with my friends on GTalk and Facebook
(no, I don't personally know anyone who uses Yahoo any more or used other
services like AIM ever at all).

~~~
tikhonj
Google chat actually uses Jabber[1]. I believe nothing stops you from using
some other Jabber service with GChat.

[1]: <http://www.jabber.org/>

Now Facebook, of course, is another story. My impression is that they use a
technology _based_ on Jabber but not compatible with anything outside of
Facebook. I could be wrong--I simply never use Facebook chat.

------
callmeed
Crap, ALL our customers use google apps for email (because we don't want to
host email on our servers and it's free).

All our customers are small businesses (photographers, designers) and usually
just make 1 to 3 mailboxes.

Any alternative out there?

~~~
vmialik
The free accounts should stay free. However opening new accounts will not be
free :(

------
jarjoura
Not to change the subject, but this decision just made my switch to Office 365
that much sweeter. If anything I love that I get push notifications (active
sync) for emails and group calendars work much better.

------
hmart
An alternative I use for educational customers is Microsoft Live Domains, also
have some comercial domains with more than 50 accounts. But given this
situation with Google I`m expecting Microsoft to do the same

------
dave_sullivan
Well... fair enough.

If you use google apps already, nothing changes (if I'm reading this
correctly?)

If you're thinking about using google apps, you've got to pay for it now.

Yes, this benefits no one but google. Then again, google has been providing
benefit to millions of people with google apps. Running your own e-mail server
is not trivial. There's a reason there are no good gmail alternatives--it's
harder than it looks.

If I were them, I would have charged for it from the beginning--it's a really
useful service. And they could have been real dicks by forcing all current
free users to start coughing up dough.

------
gm_
At least with customers being made to sign up to premium accounts with 24/7
support available there will be less horror stories of customers being locked
out of their Google Apps accounts.

------
larsberg
Ugh. The worst thing is that I've been relying on my personal domain e-mail
address _also_ being a valid google address. So I have to either pony up for
my family's accounts or move us all and re-create logins on a page or so of
"authorized apps."

Still, the huge amount of spam that's been getting through (10-15 per day,
despite always logging in to the gmail web interface and clicking Report Spam)
has been encouraging me to consider a move anyway. This change is just the
nudge I needed to finally make it happen...

~~~
fatbird
It continues to be free for existing users. They're closing sign up for free
usage.

------
gprasanth
Just the other day I was looking for ways to offer email@mydomain to people
who request it. I found that GApps was no longer offering free email. So, I
ended up using Forwarders in cPanel to do the thing for me.

Forwarders in _cPanel_ simply copy all incoming mail to email@mydomain to
myother@email. If I didn't already create an email account email@mydomain, the
incoming mail WILL NOT be stored on server which makes this a feasible
solution. If I had, incoming mail would be copied to myother@email.

------
kristofferR
Wow, I'm so glad I'm grandfathered in! I have 8 users, just for me.

Having to spend $400 on my email (or spend a lot of time either switching or
combining mail accounts) every year would be hell.

~~~
Achshar
I have grandfathered 50 users account. No idea what to do with it.

~~~
rauar
Is it a good idea to grandfather the maximum users ? Or will the existing
accounts still be able to use 10 users ?

------
tlogan
This is actually expected development. As the market matures, it is time to
start make money.

This is also means that probably less and less of online services will be
free.

Of course, you will still have "Walmarts of the online services" but you will
get what you pay for - nothing more.

And I don't think there will be "cheaper" alternatives: but I do expect
emergence of more expensive and better alternatives (if you can fork $50/year
than you can fork $100/year - free is different story).

------
admiralpumpkin
I just did a little research to see what alternatives are out there for custom
domain emails. I haven't used these Namecheap for email, though I have used
them for domain hosting after the SOPA debacle.

Namecheap offers custom domain email hosting for $2.99/user/year. 3GB storage.
Supports IMAP. 50MB attachment limit. No ads. No clue on the web interface
quality, nor spam-filtering quality, but it's definitely a good price from a
good company.

------
eunice
Re: everybody saying this was a 'free' service - Google were still harvesting
& selling off anything you put in there. It wasn't truly free.

------
mrcrassic
$50 for only THREE 9's? NO THANKS. :p

It sucks that they've removed the free version; it's definitely a step up from
managing multiple individual gmail accounts or creating a shared account of
some sort. (I use one for one of the side jobs I do; it's a pain in the ass.)

However, $50/year for premium is really friggin good, considering that the
cheapest alternative is $10/mo ($100/yr) for hosted Exchange 2010 alone.

------
jscheel
I would be happy with a one-time fee to use my domain name. I don't care about
anything else, just the domain name on the email address.

------
luckysh0t
I signed up my domain for google apps as soon as I registed it about 3 hours
ago. Must have been one of the last ones - I noticed they had taken the small
text link on the apps homepage away and I had to click through to pricing to
get the free version. Obviously Google had kicked off their deployment while I
was registering.

Totally taking this as a sign for my next app btw.

------
Gustomaximus
I hope they don't do this with Google Analytics next. Not just because it is a
great product to get for free (I'm a massive fan vs other systems). To me it
would seem wrong to come into the market @ free, wipe out or reduce much of
the competitors and then expect everyone to pay up now they have a market
dominance.

~~~
davidandgoliath
They won't. They get data on 100% of your user's / visitors this way and can
use that data to advertise to them via their search engine.

------
medell
2011-07-20: Announces Google Labs will be shutdown 2012-07-03: iGoogle will be
"retired" on 2012-11-01 2012-12-06: Google Apps no longer free

I'm not liking the direction they're going as I use all of the above
frequently (including signing up new domains for GApps regularly). It always
comes down to money at the end of the day.

------
yitchelle
Google apps for education is still free (I wonder for how long.) At least
google is focusing on charging for things that are revenue generating, however
for some education enterprise, that is debatable.

<http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/education/>

------
napoleond
I think it's time for a dedicated email service provider with full search
functionality and tools to migrate the old inbox from Google Apps. I would
gladly pay more than $50/year for a simple, rock solid service like this if it
had an excellent web client, real customer support, and cared about my
privacy.

~~~
Nux
<https://www.fastmail.fm/> is probably the closest thing to it

~~~
napoleond
That does look pretty good, thanks! I'd heard of fastmail before, but thought
they were just a hotmail clone (personal, not business).

EDIT: <https://www.zoho.com/mail> looks pretty good, too, and is the least
expensive of the pack.

------
intlect
A few years ago they were inadvertently dropping the link to the free
signup... now they've killed the product. Not fun...
[http://googleenterprise.blogspot.ro/2009/07/google-apps-
stan...](http://googleenterprise.blogspot.ro/2009/07/google-apps-standard-
edition-still-free.html)

------
jamesmiller5
I use Google Apps for my domain but forward the mail to another account which
means I see no ads and get hosted mail for free. I didn't even realize until
this announcement that I'm probably a net negative and probably not the only
person doing this.

------
vishal0123
Its a result of a/b testing done 5 months earlier:
[http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/03/free-google-apps-sign-up-
pa...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/03/free-google-apps-sign-up-page-removed-
a-sign-of-new-changes-to-come/)

------
rustc
Not to hijack this thread, but I've asked a question [1] about how to setup an
email server on a VPS, if anyone could help me(us?) out.

1: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4885281>

------
tharris0101
I'm confused here. It says nothing changes for existing customers but when I
log into my domain's Google App dashboard I see this now: "Free 30 day Google
Apps for Business trial" with an upgrade button. Does anyone else see this?

~~~
tharris0101
To answer my own question. I see now that it isn't saying that I am currently
using a free trial, the button is to upgrade and get the free trial.

This is important though. DO NOT TRY THE FREE TRIAL UNLESS YOU PLAN ON
STICKING WITH IT.

After yesterday, even if you have a legacy free account, you give up that
privilege if you try the free 30 days. See here:

[http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6...](http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60755)

------
pbreit
At one point Yahoo was tip-toeing into this market with its Zimbra purchase. I
wonder if this move prompts Yahoo to look again? $50 per email account per
year leaves a lot of room for competition.

------
antihero
I don't see what they'd lose from offering this free to personal users and
non-profits? They do free mail hosting anyway so why prevent it being
configurable to a certain domain?

------
ampersandy
Why hasn't Google offered an option to increase from the default 25GB of email
storage? Drive has an option to increase upto 16TB, but Gmail is locked at
25GB? What gives?

~~~
cllns
I would like to see a breakdown (from google) of how much storage people use.
I'd guess a majority use <1 GB, and I can't imagine many people need more than
25GB.

~~~
ampersandy
My comment is aimed at business users, not casual users. Several friends of
mine have hit the cap with their business accounts and have had to consider
alternative email providers because now they can't use their email accounts.

------
ramsevak
Actually they forcing small business to move towards hotmail. Spending
$500/year for e-mail service is not worth for small (offline) business.

~~~
davidandgoliath
Just over a dollar day isn't worth it? I'd disagree. But with that said there
are reasonable alternatives out there for less.

------
alextingle
Running your own e-mail server is _easy_. I can't believe how many people here
are throwing up their hands in horror at the idea.

~~~
jws
After decades of running my own email servers I gave up because of the never
ending blacklisting. Some random ISP will decide that your IP address is in a
bad neighborhood and blacklist you. Eventually one of your users will realize
that their mail to Aunt Vickie isn't getting through and you'll spend an hour
trying to get unblacklisted. You may or may not succeed.

If you own your own block C or larger this may not apply, but if you are
renting servers or using a colo there is woe to be had.

------
carlsednaoui
Has anyone tried Zoho?

<https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html>

------
laacz
You can still send and receive e-mail to classic @gmail.com setting up default
reply-from address to you@yourdomain.com.

------
Nux
Well, they probably filled their belly with enough user-base, now they can
ignore the rest and focus on cashing in.

------
ErikAugust
Okay, one MacGyver solution -

Buy one user account - set up a ton of aliases. Set up filters to Gmail
inboxes.

Yeah, that feels dirty... I know.

~~~
gregd
You can only have 20 domain aliases per account.

------
tnuc
Does this mean that some of my domains that are going expire might be worth
money as they have google apps?

------
thpoul
I wonder how this will affect the various hosts around who offer easy "free"
google apps integration.

~~~
gm_
Dreamhost has added a disclaimer:

 _(Google may charge you to use this feature.)_

Also, when you attempt to sign up, the link redirects to a google apps free
trial page.

------
technotony
Any competitor products out there which are still free? All I want is email
for my domains.

~~~
smiler
Surely this should be a lesson that maybe free isn't always the best option...

------
smallegan
I wonder how soon it will be before they eliminate free domestic calling on
Google Voice?

------
jemeshsu
I hope Google can offer a cheaper plan for those who needs only domain and
email.

------
kevando
Does this mean my old domains with 50 free users are now worth more?? :)

------
circa
bummer. the first thing I do when I buy a new domain is sign up there. they
make it so easy to manage. all good things must come to an end I guess.

------
kurrent
so will users who pay the $50/year still see ads on their inbox page?

~~~
level09
nope, the premium version is ad-free.

------
ing33k
any good alternatives ?

------
iashishsinha
[http://www.nextbigwhat.com/google-apps-free-for-new-
domains-...](http://www.nextbigwhat.com/google-apps-free-for-new-domains-
using-existing-accounts-297/) : This is a nice workaround. Try it out. You can
still use it for free using the existing account.

------
indiecore
_GOD_

 _DAMNIT_

I was _literally_ 10 minutes away from signing up.

~~~
thewordis
According to another blog post, you can still "switch to it" for the next 30
days. So maybe sign up for paid and then immediately switch to free?

[http://googleappsupdates.blogspot.com/2012/12/changes-to-
goo...](http://googleappsupdates.blogspot.com/2012/12/changes-to-google-apps-
packages.html)

~~~
grandpoobah
[http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2...](http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2855120)
I started the trial on or after December 6, 2012. You cannot downgrade to the
free edition, but you have the option to purchase the product or to cancel
your account.

------
camus
Could someone explain me why a business providing a service should ? give it
for free ? are google engineers working for free ? is google running its
servers for free ? so yes , google is rich , but so is your electricity
company , most gaz companies and most supermarkets. Do they give you stuffs
for free ? "freemium" model is dead , in the future you'll pay for every
service you use on the web.

~~~
michaelbuddy
I agree with you on some points here, but your statement, 'freemium is dead'
makes no sense. Gmail and all included apps is the free and Google Apps
(business) is the pay premium. If anything the model is seen fully validated
here, not dead.

------
wildchild
I am confused, if I am google apps oldfag and have 20 accounts. According to
[http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&topic=29...](http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&topic=29190&ctx=topic&answer=2855120)
can I still use it like before or I must remove 10 mailboxes to fit 10
requirement to continue free usage?

