For the many families who have used GSuites for the past years, I would love to see a $3 / month / user, maximum of 5-10 users.
I am stuck in the same boat as many others who created it for the family 10+ years ago and now am going through how to move each service (GMail, Drive, Keep, Photos, YouTube etc etc) to a plain Gmail account. I have most of it worked out, but it is going to take a lot of time getting 5 people migrated.
Same boat except I have about a dozen family members. My annual bill is going to go from $0 to $61212. That seems like a pretty big jump considering that if we all just had regular non-commercial Google accounts, the total cost would be $0. I'm not opposed to paying something, but $864 per year just to have a vanity domain is a bit much.
It seems like Google really ought to consider adding a family plan SKU to Google Workspace, disabling all the business features, and charging $75/year for a whole domain.
Instead, the current path is going to piss off thousands of their most loyal power users as they force these graybeards to manually help migrate all their family members from the Legacy GSuite plans to vanilla Google accounts. Or worse, it's going to piss off all the family members that end up losing access to every email, photo, app, and doc they've acquired over the past decade on their now defunct legacy account.
Christ, does nobody at Google give a shit about goodwill?
I also have the $99 / year Microsoft 365. This gives you 5 people, 1Tb of space each, email, calendar, etc. $99 per year. Not per person per year. Just per year.
Sadly there are too many things I have tied to Google that I am not sure if I can make that switch to Microsoft. But it is getting more and more tempting.
> Christ, does nobody at Google give a shit about goodwill?
I am holding out a tiny hope that maybe if there is enough negative PR, Google will create a cheaper plan or perhaps provide an off ramp for people that want to switch/migrate to consumer accounts.
I'm in the same situation as you but I'm undecided, I might still pay the $6/m per user price. If I do so I will be disappointed in myself for paying the danegeld for the convenience.
One tactic I am contemplating is using the Cloudflare Email Forwarder (https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/email-forwarding) - this way I can keep all the custom domain email addresses and groups/mailing-lists and redirect them to the new personal gmail accounts. Only problem is that email replies will originate from the new personal addresses.
For what it is worth, I ran into the problem of forwarding emails to gmail but having to reply with the gmail address when I setup email for my domain for my personal website. I have a vanity website and wanted to use the domain for email as well, but as little as I use it I did not want to pay even $6 a month for the privilege so I tried both forwarding and having gmail check “other accounts” using smtp.
My web host for my website gives me “free” SMTP services with my hosting so I did initially setup smtp for sending and receiving though gmail, but I ran into a problem where the web host’s smtp servers were often flagged as spam for outbound email, so that sucked. I could get email, but felt like I had to reply using my gmail address to guarantee delivery.
However, I had previously setup outbound email using AWS SES (Simple Email Service) for a different website that sends out transactional emails and had an idea. I setup AWS SES to send out my personal domain emails from gmail and now delivery is great. I rarely have emails flagged as spam. Unfortunately, AWS SES is outbound only, so you cannot use it for both inbound and outbound. I get inbound email to gmail by having it setup to check the web host’s smtp (but you could use forwarding like you mention), and I send outbound email through AWS SES with great delivery results, all through the gmail web client.
Now, this is not a route I would casually recommend. It is arguably a pain in the a* to setup AWS SES. But since this audience here on Hackernews is more of a geek/DIY crowd I thought I would mention it. You can setup AWS SES to send out emails from a personal account for pennies a month. You could arguably setup a Free tier AWS account and never go over the free limits. If you are willing to do some upfront work, it can be dirt cheap to do, and you get to learn the intricacies of email setup like SPF, DMARC, and DKIM.
> Only problem is that email replies will originate from the new personal addresses.
You can configure a regular gmail account to send from the custom domain. Visit:
Settings -> Accounts and Import -> Send mail as
You'll have to confirm ownership of the alternate email address, but it works fine. Even if the alternate email address is associated with a Gsuite domain.
I've looked previously, but it requested SMTP address + username/password. I wouldn't have those because that custom domain email address will be forwarded (receiving only - not send). Am I missing something here?
As long as your spf record allows Google to send mail, you can.
You need to setup an "App password" on your Google account. Then, when you create an alias, you enter smtp.gmail.com and your app password credential as the smtp server.
One problem I have found with this is that the iOS mail app does not have a provision for sending email through a different SMTP server. Has anyone seen a workaround for that? If you send a reply from iOS, even if you have configured the custom-domain email address as an alias on the account, recipients still see "on behalf of ..."
If you see my response above, the method I use removes that annoying caveat. Outbound emails are signed and validated using the custom domain through AWS SES and you don’t get “behalf of” label.
Seeing as this is going to be rather annoying process regardless, might I tempt you to consider non-Google alternatives for at least some of those services? Here are some that have good family/organisation support.
Protonmail[0], for example, has Mail, Calendar, and a Drive service. Pricing is on the high side, unfortunately.
Migadu[1] has Mail and Calendar, and pricing is particularly attractive.
I've considered switching to Migadu in the past, but an outgoing limit of 20/day on the "micro" plan seems weirdly low, especially considering they're advertising it as being for families. It would just take e.g. one family member sending holiday greetings to a few friends to use up everyone's budget for the day. Having your outgoing emails randomly delayed for 24 hours just doesn't feel right for me.
The next higher plan would already have me pay almost five times as much and apart from the higher limits just enables business features that are unnecessary for families.
Yah, I'm currently a (otherwise happy) Migadu customer, and I also think the send limit on the micro plan is strangely low.
I've only personally hit the limit once in the last two years, but I have a hard time believing that e.g.: 100 emails a day would impact their bottom line. I'm kinda tempted to just use Sendgrid's free tier for SMTP which is 100/d.
I'm okay with the $72/user/year price, I think that is fair for what is included. But I have 147 users on my family domain account, and it would be a nightmare for me to individually bill all of them to share the expense.
I can't see this being less than a 60 hour project for me to deal with in total, so the main thing I'm upset about is what I perceive to be a short amount of time to deal with.
So far my best bet looks like signing up as a Fastmail reseller so that users can be directly billed by Fastmail. My preference would be to stay with Google because of all the issues I think I might run into by migrating off of it (mostly related to using it for authentication for other services, which is a practice I no longer do, but did for some time).
If Google would allow each user to pay separately for what they need, then that would be an easy decision for me, because I want to stay, but I don't want to pitch 146 other Wikman's to pay me to pay Google.
Also in that very same boat. I'm prepared to go through the pain of migrating email, calendars etc. - but I've not been able to find out if there's any way to retain the app / video purchases made under the Google accounts that are part of the workspace.
Semi-related... I TA'ed a Comp Sci class a long time ago (back when they had to submit their code as print-outs). I read through the print-outs and noticed that the "look" of one of them seemed oddly familiar (blocks, line lengths, indenting etc). I went back through the others and found another one that was almost exactly the same.
Took it to the Prof and we agreed the ones that copied got 0 on the project, and the ones who allowed the copying got 50% of their mark. Honestly, they got off quite easy.
I got hit by this yesterday. I run a postfix server with a spamcop check and email stopped coming through. I had fail2ban setup to shut out bad SMTP requests and interestingly this spamcop issue made fail2ban completely ban the incoming SMTP requests.
Thankfully I figured that part of it out, but it is nice to see where the issue actually came from.
So in the article we also reported in the experimental results section, the performance increase when we fit the individual parameters using the network topology found, and compared it to the non-tuned parameters.
This reminds me a lot of the work on compressed neural network from Jan Koutnik and his colleagues. They don't evolve topology of a NN, but they learn weights of a neural network in some compressed space. That seems to be very similar to weight sharing.
For example, in the case of the cart pole (without swing up) benchmark a simple linear controller with equal positive weights is required which can easily be encoded with this approach.
