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.
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.
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.
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.
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 have a couple small businesses on it for nothing other than convenience. I clicked this hoping for a pleasant surprise but instead got an expected reality. No problem, email migration is one of the easiest out there (as long as you aren’t to tangled in their other services) and I find myself using clients more than their web interface anymore so much of the gmail advantage is non-existent.
> Was the gmail advantage ever in their web interface?
Compared to hotmail and yahoo mail it was, compared to a desktop client not so much.
> For me it was always their spam handling that set them apart from everyone else.
It seems they've done such a good job that there isn't much of a spam market anymore, looking in my spam folder (gmail) I'm averaging 1-2 a day and that includes false positives.
On the corporate email using a different filter I only see about 1 spam message get through a year, so they might not even have a competitive advantage there.
This could backfire. While $2/mo is no big deal, a lot of smaller customers don't actually need the "Business" flavor so they could downgrade to "Basic". Or they could consider moving to Microsoft: $12 per user is substantially more than Office 365 Business (which costs $10 per user per month, or just $8.25/user/mo with 1 year commitment).
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
Before paying a cent, all our users evaluate Migadu through our free, unlimited trial plan. The free plan supports one email domain, unlimited number of mailboxes, 1 Gigabyte of email storage and 10 outgoing messages per day which include a discreet signature "Sent via Migadu" at the bottom of each message.
If the limits of the free trial plan fit your needs and you do not mind the signature, you are welcome to stay on the free plan forever. There is no time limit. Upgrade only when ready and convinced.
I mean I rarely sent more than 10 email on my personal account. It is more of a receiving end. And this is awesome.
Edit: This needs to get submitted to HN in later hours for more exposure.
I have grand-fathered accounts for my custom domains from when it was free, but I still just forward and delegate to my free non GSuite personal gmail. If Google ever kills those I'm gonna just move the domains to a different mail provider and forward to my personal gmail the same way.
I just switched from GSuite to https://www.pobox.com. For $20 a year they manage your email address and forward anything sent to it to another account. I have a gmail free account set up to send emails via smtp through pobox, which works great. It's the service a lot of open-source people use, like gitster.
We've been using Google Meet https://meet.google.com which is the current comparable to Zoom, Webex, etc. It's pretty solid. Actually like it more than other services. Curious, what issues did you face?
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.