
New Pricing for G Suite Basic and Business Editions - d99kris
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/new-pricing-for-g-suite-basic-and-business-editions
======
ndiscussion
Why is "New Pricing" always higher? Not a real question, but it lowers my
confidence in Google to see them pull stupid marketing tricks like this.

I'm also a little surprised they're raising prices. I figured this monthly
revenue was practically nothing on their bottom line, and that they would
prefer to keep users on their platform for network effect reasons.

Their chat product also kinda sucks. Ever tried searching your hangouts for a
nugget of information? Generally when I think I've typed something in
hangouts, I do a search, find absolutely nothing relevant (despite knowing
it's in there somewhere), give up, and just check another source.

~~~
Scarbutt
_I 'm also a little surprised they're raising prices._

They are leveraging(forcing?) their dominance in email to charge more. OTOH,
I'm finding their docs stuff to be pretty good these days.

~~~
kuhhk
>OTOH, I'm finding their docs stuff to be pretty good these days.

What do you mean? You’re willing to pay higher because they improved their
documentation?

~~~
gwright
"Google Docs" (docs.google.com) not "Google documentation"

------
berlam
I am a long-time user of GSuite/ Google Apps for Work and have a custom domain
with accounts for my family members. I updated my free tier account from 2009
to a paid subscription in 2014, which I must say now, was a big mistake. The
biggest drawback I see currently is that some features will never come to
GSuite, like family subscriptions for Google Play Music and sharing of
purchased apps and movies. Every purchase made with my GSuite account will be
gone, if I choose to cancel my subscription and decide to go somewhere else.
This is what really bothers me currently and prevents me from switching to
another service. It would be fair, to have a GSuite-to-Free account
functionality somewhere for the Google Play purchases. I would also be happy,
if they would keep a cheaper GSuite subscription for families with less
features but all the family sharing options.

Beside that, I am not completely sure, if it is legal to have purchases/ paid
digital goods linked to a monthly/annually paid account.

~~~
th0br0
The odd thing is that you can freely share family subscriptions bought on a
single GMail account with members of a GSuite org.

------
compsciphd
As an aside, google breaks things for the free users of gsuite (academic or
grandfathered accounts) and shows no intent to fix it. While its
understandable that they don't provide a high level of support, breaking
things and not fixing them doesn't give me confidence to ever want to pay for
the higher tier products.

example: gmail's "default routing" is mostly ignored with the proviso that it
knows that the rules exist so if one creates a user that corresponds to an
email already in the default routing section, it complains.

------
rajuvegesna
We have to ask the question...why do these vendors keep increasing prices?
Shouldn’t the economies of scale reduce prices instead? AWS has the right
attitude to keep reducing prices. We need this attitude in software.

Its either greed or market pressure to keep showing increasing profits/growth.

PS: I am with Zoho. We recently reduced prices.
[https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html](https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html)

~~~
cannonedhamster
As a user of Zoho who switched from GSuite. I've been very happy with your
service so far. Support got back to me quickly when I needed help and the
documentation answered most of my questions. I find some of the plans a bit
confusing, but I can do everything I need to do. I didn't even realize prices
went down, but whatever I paid was a good deal for what I've gotten. Thanks!

I am not affiliated with Zoho in any way.

------
abstrct
I have a couple small businesses on it for nothing other than convenience. I
clicked this hoping for a pleasant surprise but instead got an expected
reality. No problem, email migration is one of the easiest out there (as long
as you aren’t to tangled in their other services) and I find myself using
clients more than their web interface anymore so much of the gmail advantage
is non-existent.

~~~
lozaning
Was the gmail advantage ever in their web interface? For me it was always
their spam handling that set them apart from everyone else.

~~~
flukus
> Was the gmail advantage ever in their web interface?

Compared to hotmail and yahoo mail it was, compared to a desktop client not so
much.

> For me it was always their spam handling that set them apart from everyone
> else.

It seems they've done such a good job that there isn't much of a spam market
anymore, looking in my spam folder (gmail) I'm averaging 1-2 a day and that
includes false positives.

On the corporate email using a different filter I only see about 1 spam
message get through a year, so they might not even have a competitive
advantage there.

------
m0zg
This could backfire. While $2/mo is no big deal, a lot of smaller customers
don't actually need the "Business" flavor so they could downgrade to "Basic".
Or they could consider moving to Microsoft: $12 per user is substantially more
than Office 365 Business (which costs $10 per user per month, or just
$8.25/user/mo with 1 year commitment).

~~~
toomuchtodo
Or move to FastMail.

~~~
m0zg
FastMail offers spreadsheets, word processing, and cloud storage now?

~~~
toomuchtodo
No, but your business might not need those features. Why pay for what you’re
not using?

~~~
kumarvvr
Most businesses do need those features. Businesses using only mail are
relatively few and far between.

~~~
jrnichols
true, but they might not need all of their documents in the cloud. Google
Sheets/etc is still going to be free, Office is affordable, or even the
Pages/Numbers/Keynote option works if you're a Mac shop.

Or perhaps even LibreOffice.

~~~
dbg31415
You can't use a free version of Google Drive if you run a business.

You'll eventually need to be able to turn off access for employees who leave,
and run audits to verify that you're in compliance around data security. If
you're on the free version, even if you have everyone re-create an account
with their company email, you still can't administer anything and you'd be
forced to ask your staff for their passwords in order to verify sharing
access.

~~~
jrnichols
That's not going stop people from trying, and stumbling along the way. _shrug_

------
radicalriddler
Wait. So am I getting this right? They scrapped Hangouts, in favour of 2
seperate apps, Hangout Meet and Hangout Chat, and they are using that as a
reason to raise their prices?

Cloud Search seems interesting. But the email auto-completion isn't full
enough, especially in a business environment to even bother using. None of
this is worth a 20% increase in prices...

------
j16sdiz
I have heard stories of one bad employee account locked by Google make the
whole domain being locked. It take days to contact unlock...

------
dbg31415
Literally just a 20% price hike.

Why bother with all the fluff, just say, "We're charging you 20% more now."

------
ymolodtsov
Honestly, for what they are offering it’s still pretty cheap, if you include
Gmail, G-Suite and Meet. I’d love them to have a proper chat app though.

There is a lot of young startups offering just a single product for a higher
monthly price. Still, I was thinking that Google cares more about the adoption
of its cloud office package and probably doesn’t get a lot of its revenue from
it.

------
sjroot
Literally the only reason I pay for GSuite is to be able to use Gmail with my
custom domains. I imagine a lot of their Basic membership subscribers are
similar. This might be a deal-breaker for me because I was already debating on
if it was worth the $5/mo.

Are there any other solid alternatives that the HN crowd can recommend?

~~~
itsrajju
Check out Migadu. They are a Swiss company and offer unlimited domains and
mailboxes for just $4 a month. The only drawback is that you can only send 100
emails a day combined from all your email addresses. Good for personal use I
guess.

They also have higher tiers if you want to send more emails.

[https://www.migadu.com/en/pricing.html](https://www.migadu.com/en/pricing.html)

~~~
androidgirl
Omg! That's absolutely exactly what I need for all my sites. Thank you!

~~~
ksec
And it gets even better

 _Before paying a cent, all our users evaluate Migadu through our free,
unlimited trial plan. The free plan supports one email domain, unlimited
number of mailboxes, 1 Gigabyte of email storage and 10 outgoing messages per
day which include a discreet signature "Sent via Migadu" at the bottom of each
message.

If the limits of the free trial plan fit your needs and you do not mind the
signature, you are welcome to stay on the free plan forever. There is no time
limit. Upgrade only when ready and convinced._

I mean I rarely sent more than 10 email on my personal account. It is more of
a receiving end. And this is awesome.

Edit: This needs to get submitted to HN in later hours for more exposure.

------
ksec
I wonder their reason behind the price increase,

Inflation as in developers salary is forever increasing.

Or they charge more just because they can.

------
k__
I used Hangouts today and it was really bad.

Had much better experience with AWS Chime and Zoom.

~~~
sahaskatta
We've been using Google Meet
[https://meet.google.com](https://meet.google.com) which is the current
comparable to Zoom, Webex, etc. It's pretty solid. Actually like it more than
other services. Curious, what issues did you face?

------
greatamerican
TLDR: We are increasing prices 20%.

