I really hate it when companies try to sugar coat a decision that is <i>all</i> downside for their customers. It may be really hard to do, but Google should just come out and say it: <i>there is no upside for this to anyone except Google</i>. It is not about giving you a <i>better experience</i> or making things more <i>straightforward</i>. It is <i>all</i> 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.<p>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.
Contrarian view...<p>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.<p>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.<p>Certainly until today the $ size of the addressable market in the small business email space was practically $0 given Google's position.<p><i>[discuss :)]</i>
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.<p>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!)<p>So full snark here, but it was between google apps, and office 365. I chose GA because o my familiarity with it.<p>But look here, Microsoft's equivalent offering is free: <a href="https://domains.live.com/" rel="nofollow">https://domains.live.com/</a> I wonder what things will look like when we evaluate google apps next year?
As a Googler and for much longer, a Google Apps user for my family, this is sad news.<p>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.<p>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.
I'll tell you what the free plan was most useful for: business experiments.<p>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
Outlook.com's equivalent offering, <a href="https://domains.live.com" rel="nofollow">https://domains.live.com</a>, 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.<p>If you want a guide, this one seems pretty good:
<a href="http://www.omegaweb.com/2012/09/how-to-configure-a-custom-domain-with-outlook-com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.omegaweb.com/2012/09/how-to-configure-a-custom-do...</a><p>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.<p>Most likely they're all in denial.
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.
Yes, the announcement is corporate doublespeak.<p>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.<p>US$50 per year for a set of critical, heavily-used services is an inconsequential amount for all but the most penny-pinching operation.
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.<p>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.<p>I <i>would</i> 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.<p>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.<p>Anyone working on something like this?
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>1) On giving too much away…<p>Remember, Google Apps started with 200 free users, later reduced it to 100, then to 50, then to 10 and now to zero.<p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/23/google-puts-the-squeeze-on-free-apps/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/23/google-puts-the-squeeze-on-...</a><p>At 200 free users, there was no room for a new entrant in the market. I am glad that didn't last long.<p>2) On Charging too low...<p>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 $10/user/month option (which didn't exist earlier).<p>Disclaimer: I work for Zoho, competition to Google Apps.
With this decision, I have now come to believe that Google is not the company that it used to be in the past. The user-friendly company with a quirky personality.<p>Somewhere in the mindless fighting with becoming the dominant social and mobile force on the planet, it has forgotten about the very users it once strived to please.<p>This has been more apparent since Larry took over Google as the CEO. His "more wood behind fewer arrows" has somewhere down the line taken away the humor with which Google has largely operated. 20% time? Google Labs? Hugely popular Google products scrapped into oblivion.<p>The only products that matter beyond search are - Android, Google+, YouTube and Google Apps which are fairly mature by now and are a serious threat to competitors.<p>The thing is they didn't need to do it because they aren't starving of computing resources for more important products and the marginal costs of adding free users is almost nil (although it exists).<p>I somehow feel betrayed by this decision. Google, so far, has resisted the temptation to shut down products that were important to it's users unlike other companies like Microsoft and Yahoo! I have been using Google Apps since they launched it a long ago. It feels like bait and switch.<p>This is completely right and there is nothing wrong with them shutting down a free service as a business but somehow it feels so non-Googly.
On a related note could dear hn crowd suggest email provider (maybe paid, say up to 30-40$ annually) caring about my privacy a little bit more? Really delete my messages when I want to is a good start.<p>Google is all good but I feel I should not put all of my emails in one account..
Google believes the cloud/apps have enough providers now, so they aren't needed to drive it.<p>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.<p>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 (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm</a>)
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).<p>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.
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.
Google under Larry Page is obsessed with short-term revenue. They did the same with AppEngine, Maps and now Apps.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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 =(
<i>Please note this change has no impact on our existing customers, including those using the free version.</i><p>I give it six months before they start strong-arming free users into paid accounts.
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.<p>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?
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.<p>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.
I have a free Google Apps account mostly so that I can have a custom domain for my small (free) App Engine site: <a href="https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/domain" rel="nofollow">https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/domain</a><p>It's sad that now attaching a custom domain will cost a lot more than the domain itself.
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).<p>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.<p>It's essentially Exchange, but much easier to manage, and far cheaper.<p>They also have a Sharepoint/Box alternative, Workspace, that I now love.<p>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.
This might be painful at the beginning but it could be a win-win situation in <i>long term</i> for most parties:<p>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?
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.
Found a workaround to still sign up for the standard plan, modify the following URL to include your domain: <a href="http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/standard/selectDomain?existingDomain=YOURDOMAIN.COM&newDomain=false&ownDomain=true" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/standard/selectDomain?existin...</a><p>Likely to be disabled very soon.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
For people who just need email forwarding <a href="https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/</a> work great. They charge $0.02/forwarded domain/day. So ~7USD per year per domain. I'm a customer for 5+ years, no complaints.
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.<p>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.<p>Meh, their loss. May have to go with Microsoft's alternative or something.
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.
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.
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.
Wow, I actually <i>just</i> 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.
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 :-/
In reading the comments generally I feel like there's two main groups being affected here: small businesses and small groups (families, geeks, whatever).<p>The first group—small businesses—can of course afford $50/user/year, even if they would rather not spend it.<p>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.)<p>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.
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.<p>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.
I wonder how this will effect the Google Apps Marketplace
<a href="https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/?pli=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/?pli=1</a><p>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.<p>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.
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 $50 a license.
Create a start-up with:<p>3 way email sync (mobile/web/desktop) like exchange server (or other enterprise stuff)<p>A slick feature rich UI<p>Custom domains via MX<p>Solid spam filtering<p><i>There is nothing out there that does this for under 10$/month per user and I think there is a solid market for a better price point.</i>
Office 365 is much cheaper now - <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/compare-plans.aspx?WT.z_O365_ca=Buy_online-software_en-us" rel="nofollow">http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/compare-plans.aspx?...</a>
Wow, now I feel <i>really</i> lucky that I signed up for a free account just a couple of weeks ago.<p>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...
Crap, ALL our customers use google apps for email (because we don't want to host email on our servers and it's free).<p>All our customers are small businesses (photographers, designers) and usually just make 1 to 3 mailboxes.<p>Any alternative out there?
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.
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
Well... fair enough.<p>If you use google apps already, nothing changes (if I'm reading this correctly?)<p>If you're thinking about using google apps, you've got to pay for it now.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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."<p>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...
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.<p>Forwarders in <i>cPanel</i> 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.
Wow, I'm so glad I'm grandfathered in! I have 8 users, just for me.<p>Having to spend $400 on my email (or spend a lot of time either switching or combining mail accounts) every year would be hell.
This is actually expected development. As the market matures, it is time to start make money.<p>This is also means that probably less and less of online services will be free.<p>Of course, you will still have "Walmarts of the online services" but you will get what you pay for - nothing more.<p>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).
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.<p>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.
$50 for only THREE 9's? NO THANKS. :p<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.)<p>However, $50/year for premium is really friggin good, considering that the cheapest alternative is $10/mo ($100/yr) for hosted Exchange 2010 alone.
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.<p>Totally taking this as a sign for my next app btw.
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.
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<p>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.
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.<p><a href="http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/education/" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/education/</a>
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.
A few years ago they were inadvertently dropping the link to the free signup... now they've killed the product.
Not fun...
<a href="http://googleenterprise.blogspot.ro/2009/07/google-apps-standard-edition-still-free.html" rel="nofollow">http://googleenterprise.blogspot.ro/2009/07/google-apps-stan...</a>
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.
Its a result of a/b testing done 5 months earlier:
<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/03/free-google-apps-sign-up-page-removed-a-sign-of-new-changes-to-come/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/03/free-google-apps-sign-up-pa...</a>
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.<p>1: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4885281" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4885281</a>
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?
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.
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?
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?
<a href="http://www.nextbigwhat.com/google-apps-free-for-new-domains-using-existing-accounts-297/" rel="nofollow">http://www.nextbigwhat.com/google-apps-free-for-new-domains-...</a> : This is a nice workaround. Try it out. You can still use it for free using the existing account.
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.
I am confused, if I am google apps oldfag and have 20 accounts. According to <a href="http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&topic=29190&ctx=topic&answer=2855120" rel="nofollow">http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&topic=29...</a> can I still use it like before or I must remove 10 mailboxes to fit 10 requirement to continue free usage?