Google is making AI in Gmail and Docs free, but raising the price of Workspace

&gt;Workspace AI includes things like email summaries in Gmail, generated designs for spreadsheets and videos, an automated note-taker for meetings, the powerful NotebookLM research assistant, and writing tools across apps.<p>Maybe I&#x27;m just an old curmudgeon stuck in my ways, but I haven&#x27;t found much compelling value in these use cases in my day-to-day work. For summaries and note-taking specifically, I feel they&#x27;re solving the wrong problem: it&#x27;s not that I have all this information that I really want to go through, but it&#x27;s that I have too much information and it&#x27;s become all noise.<p>The real solution to too much email is fewer and higher-priority emails. The real solution to too many meetings is fewer and more-focused meetings. These tools paper over the root cause of the problem, which is that people&#x2F;organizations cannot (or are unwilling to) be clear about communication priorities and say &quot;maybe this email&#x2F;meeting isn&#x27;t a good use of time after all.&quot;

I saw a Google AI advert that said:<p>&quot;Hey Gemini, write an apology email for my friend. I can&#x27;t make their wedding.&quot;<p>That&#x27;s not a future I want to live in, and I love making machines work for me.<p>Thats not what I want my children to think is OK.<p>A friend of mine is a teacher and kids are already delegating their learning to ChatGPT and their learning isn&#x27;t sticking.<p>What happens when social skills are delegated too?

I pay for 3 Workspace orgs, and I have Gemini disabled (or still not enabled) on all 3 of them. I&#x27;m angry that I&#x27;ll have to pay more for features I don&#x27;t use. Gemini should be an add-on cost, not included in the base cost<p>If they&#x27;re raising the price of personal GMail, I don&#x27;t have a problem. But Workspace with hundreds of users, now that&#x27;s a problem, because it actually hurts my wallet significantly. When this increase comes, I&#x27;ll have to move elsewhere.

We are doing a Gemini POC and this nugget dropped in my lap today. We were not entirely unprepared as a result. The default level of access is just the interactive chatbot thing. However if you enable the Google Workspace extension it will be able to search and process all the information stored in your workspace account and also any Google Drive files that are shared with you. This includes stuff you didn&#x27;t know you had access to in Shared Drives so folks better make sure their permissions are locked down. Workspace admins might be advised to turn it off at the org level until they understand the ramifications.

Workspace was $12&#x2F;month, now it will be $14 with AI included. AI was $20&#x2F;month.<p>Looks like AI as an add-on wasn&#x27;t selling too well.

Cool, great, fun. I have all of the “generative AI” features disabled in Workspace, and now I get to pay more for the privilege of keeping them disabled. Thanks, Google!

I recently got Gemini Advanced as an additional benefit by virtue of having Google One paid storage. I&#x27;m shocked this is being given away for free, because it is now a seriously major part of my work. I literally have an Open window all day long interacting with it. It does make me wonder how much they are losing (investing) on giving all this inference away for free. Also makes me wonder what they are getting back aside from loyalty&#x2F;data&#x2F;?<p>I always felt ripped off by the 5TB&#x2F;10TB plans (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;one.google.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;plans?hl=en&amp;g1_landing_page=0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;one.google.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;plans?hl=en&amp;g1_landing_page=0</a>) but now I find it to be a bargain with Gemini bundled in.

What are the odds that they will tally that extra $2&#x2F;user&#x2F;month up as &quot;AI revenue&quot; regardless of how many subscribers actually use those features?

I tested Gemini today, asking it to extract key pieces of data from a large report (72 slide) PDF deck which includes various visualisations, and present it as structured data. It failed miserably. Two of the key stats that are the backbone of the report, it simply made up. When I queried it, it gave an explanation, which further compounded its error. When I queried that, extracted the specific slide, and provided it, it repeated the same error.<p>I asked Claude to do the same thing, it got every data point, and created a little react dashboard and a relatively detailed text summary.<p>I used exactly the same prompt with each.

Ugh. The &quot;vanity domains for gmail&quot; product i&#x27;ve been buying for a long time is really metastasizing into something that&#x27;s both too expensive and actually worse than the free experience, wonderful.<p>It’s weird that prediction 8, &quot;Someday [you] will voluntarily pay Google for one of their services&quot; has come around full circle to &quot;and then you won&#x27;t anymore, because they&#x27;ve dropped the ball to an extent usually associated with the private equity buyout -&gt; loot into bankruptcy process&quot;

Wish Google would just fix the Drive search rather than lard it up with AI nonsense. Often it’s easier to ask someone to resend the link to a document than find it by searching.

I&#x27;m in the middle of a free trial for the Workspace Gemini add-on.<p>It really, really sucks. I&#x27;ve played around with having it make tables for Sheets and it frequently gets confused or responds with ~&quot;I can&#x27;t do that, I&#x27;m just a LLM&quot;, even when feeding it one of their suggested examples word for word. Sometimes it&#x27;s willing to iterate, sometimes it refuses. Once it gets confused,the only way I&#x27;ve been able to get it working again is by clearing the session and starting fresh.<p>And it&#x27;s sloooow.<p>None of this saves me any time or frustration.

FYI If you want to turn this off in workspace you&#x27;ll need to go here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;admin.google.com&#x2F;ac&#x2F;managedsettings&#x2F;47208553126" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;admin.google.com&#x2F;ac&#x2F;managedsettings&#x2F;47208553126</a> and here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;admin.google.com&#x2F;ac&#x2F;managedsettings&#x2F;793154499678" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;admin.google.com&#x2F;ac&#x2F;managedsettings&#x2F;793154499678</a>.

Forcing you to pay for features you never asked for and won&#x27;t use. I&#x27;m sure this will work out great for google in the long term.

Does this apply to the legacy free edition? I suspect not, since that edition is now only available for personal use and they mostly focus on Business and Enterprise use cases, but their public guidance isn&#x27;t very clear. If it does apply, would we legacy free edition users be receiving Gemini under the Google Workspace Terms of Service preventing them from using our data for general AI training, or under the regular Google Terms of Service which might allow this?<p>(Tangent: I say &quot;might allow this&quot; because I don&#x27;t know to what degree EU law requires some additional level of consent beyond accepting the Terms of Service for EU-based accounts like mine currently is, or requires them to give me an AI-specific opt-out despite having a free account. But this announcement doesn&#x27;t change whatever EU law does or doesn&#x27;t require, so that is unrelated to my main questions about which Gemini features will apply to the legacy free edition under which Terms of Service once this change rolls out.)

Oh no nobody’s buying your ai vaporware, let’s make everyone suffer!

I can&#x27;t be alone in not wanting these features? I don&#x27;t mind them being available, but I do fear a nearterm future where they are active whether I ask them to be or not.<p>I remember all of the scorn clippy got years ago. How is this any different? I think Inbox was probably more useful, and they didn&#x27;t push it near this hard. :(

I’m on paid Google Workspace for my one-man business : I paid for a month of the separate AI add-on but I stupidly agreed to an “annual commitment” which means that, even though I don’t use the AI stuff (it’s not particularly useful) I have to keep paying for it every month for a whole year! :-(<p>Anybody know if this means they’ll let me off my annual commitment now that it’s included in the base price?

Stuck on GSuite Legacy (with my own domain) and Google won&#x27;t let me give them money to upgrade my storage. Workspace too expensive for family purposes.<p>Recently got a new phone and can&#x27;t use Gemini with my old GSuite Legacy account.<p>No migration path back to personal @gmail.com accounts for my family.<p>When I moved from an @fastmail.fm email to my own domain years and years ago I just gave them money and added my domain to my account. No fuss.<p>Google are hopeless. They have all this consumer brand recognition and just squander it on garbage.<p>Google One + your own personal domain name would be great but presumably they&#x27;re afraid it&#x27;ll dismantle Workspace for small businesses.

We have Workspace with Gemini and I haven&#x27;t yet found a case where it did something useful for me.<p>The times that I had it try to find information in my gDrive folders it didn&#x27;t find what I wanted, and I ended up using search as usual. It was also slower than me searching and looking through the docs.

For small startups, what are some good alternatives to Workspace?<p>I use workspace due to familiarity with Gmail, and no other reason. Would love to know some cheap&#x2F;easy alternatives.

it feels like google in panic mode, the only thing it can think of is to put a chatbot everywhere, just b&#x2F;c it can. I don&#x27;t see a value proposition at all.

It’s time saas apps realise that they can’t make 2.5x normal license money by just sticking AI to it.<p>In our SaaS we added it for free. We realised that there is no way to sustainably make money off of this in long term.<p>It’s a great feature but not 2.5x price worth feature.

So, a 16% price increase and AI is included?

I don&#x27;t like AI being used in anything remotely creative.<p>I don&#x27;t draw, not well, but I write, slightly better. I occasionally ask WordPress to have its AI generate a little blurb for me, and always wind up deleting it. It takes something I can&#x27;t really describe, my voice I guess, and sucks it out. It homogenizes my writing to try to make it fit some bland ideal. I imagine to those more keen on art than I, AI art is similarly off.<p>And yes, stories are not the primary use of Gmail. But in business, words matter, and two seemingly synonymous words can be quite different, and two words that seem opposite may not be. I have a friend who teaches law, and they mentioned it was quite easy to tell which students cheated on one particular assignment discussing contracts. If I recall right, material contracts are a type of contract, and AI made up immaterial contracts.<p>While this mistake would hopefully be obvious, other mixups might not be, with potentially serious consequences.

This is annoying and badly done IMO. I also don&#x27;t like or need the features and wouldn&#x27;t pay for them if I didn&#x27;t have to.<p>That said, what you get from Google for a few dollars &#x2F; month is so far over and above any other SaaS that I&#x27;m happy to keep paying (and paying more).

I&#x27;d rather Google fix the calender integration in Gmail first.<p>I used to get automatically created calender events from Gmail for hotels, flights, etc. This was really nice.<p>But somehow it stopped working well recently. Some emails were not regonized at all (booking.com). Some flight emails are missing return flight.

I&#x27;m honestly getting a bit sick of subscription pricing, especially for things like &quot;productivity apps.&quot; and G-Suite (although sadly the MS alternative isn&#x27;t any better).<p>At the end of the day, we just do the same ol&#x27; simple word processing we&#x27;ve done for the last 20 years.<p>Are there good corporate email alternatives that just do email&#x2F;calendars and do them well with business-type SLAs? Zoho? FastMail?

One thing I really loved is automated transcripts on youtube. I love watching youtube videos, but sometimes I want to remember where I heard some statement, so I can just copy paste the entire transcript and do ctrl+f on it.<p>So sad that they removed this feature. There is third party websites offering it, but I&#x27;d prefer it on the main site.<p>This feature had been added years ago, way before the AI hype was as big as it is now (but it&#x27;s always been using deep learning models).

Did they recently hire some Microsoft PMs?<p>&quot;Our shiny new product isn&#x27;t selling. How do we pump up the numbers?&quot;<p>&quot;Bundle it into another popular product, of course.&quot;

We&#x27;ve got a massive communications problem in our society, people do not know how to express efficiently, they under and over document, but rarely document &quot;just so&quot; one can use whatever, understand whatever, without a majority of the information exchange being throw away &quot;wrapping&quot; information, framing information.<p>LLM AIs are forcing this issue to an apex, if and only if you and your peers realize this working with LLMs is also a communications issue, also one of framing information so both the correct information is delivered and a minimum of wrapping information that needs to be filtered through to understand is not delivered. The same reason you cannot explain to your boss, or coworker, or spouse some troublesome issue preventing a goal is also why you cannot get the quality replies you want from an LLM. You cannot express you request, your information effectively so the audience can understand what you meant.

&gt; [Billing and Service Notice] Google Workspace service and pricing updates<p>&gt; Dear administrator,<p>&gt; Starting today, your Google Workspace subscription includes new AI features designed to help your users improve their productivity and innovation. With these changes, we will also be updating subscription pricing starting March 17, 2025.<p>&gt; ...<p>&gt; These features were previously available only to users with a Gemini for Google Workspace Add-on, but now will be included with Google Workspace Business Standard plans. You will see these features added to your subscription in the coming weeks. Soon, you&#x27;ll get access to even more Gemini features in your Google Workspace apps.<p>&gt; Review the Google Workspace blog announcement to learn more about these changes.<p>&gt; Starting March 17, 2025*, your Google Workspace Business Standard subscription price will be automatically updated to $14.00 per user, per month with an Annual&#x2F;Fixed-Term Plan (or $16.80 if you have a monthly Flexible Plan).

I&#x27;m not convinced the &quot;Gemini all the things&quot; strategy was the right move with Workspace, they rolled it out so fast which indicates that UX research was likely rushed or bypassed completely. Had they conducted their typical extensive UXR process they would have discovered that the features are not very useful being baked into the suite.<p>Now where I do think there is opportunity is in building out the standalone Gemini app, as ChatGPT has proven with their Teams product that there is business value in having a dedicated chat UI for your business. We are currently subscribed to ChatGPT for Teams and use it every day across product and engineering, there isn&#x27;t a need for it to be integrated directly into our productivity suite UX, but pulling data out from the suite (e.g Google Drive) into the chat UI is helpful. Organizing project folders, custom GPTs etc also hold value for us.

Okay, I have a lot of projects with a couple of email addresses attached to their domain name<p>In the US and European market, this was seen as a bare minimum level of professionalism and validation (other markets are more advanced on this front and have been on chat apps for the entire business for at least a decade)<p>regardless for email, I had been using Google workplaces for this<p>What’s a cheaper alternative? last time I tried something else I found I was vendor locked to google even when trying to accept calendar invites from people in other organizations that sent google calendar. That was 5 years ago though<p>some sectors like web3 let you do the whole project with just a username on discord&#x2F;telegram&#x2F;x but I do want to consider migrating my emails away from google workspace now. Its difficult to manage even changing the credit cards on file with so many projects like if one expires

Anyone have a recommendation for moving from Google workspace that has email, docs, calendar, and contacts capability? I don&#x27;t really need anything else aside from those capabilities. Fastmail isn&#x27;t sufficient

So they&#x27;re raising prices just because they&#x27;re now including some AI nonsense?

We’ll surely see a note is their next earnings release about the uptick in Gemini usage

If I shut down my Google Workspace account, will all the videos my users have posted on YouTube be taken down?<p>Also, long ago, it was possible to set up an individual Gmail account with a non-gmail.com domain. Is that still possible?

I accidentally started the Gemini-the-product free trial in Workspace while trying to find how I could test Gemini-the-model in AI studio.<p>The first task that I asked for it’s assistance with, was how to disable, cancel or unsubscribe from Gemini-the-product. It repeatedly and confidently made up instructions to adjust settings that didn’t exist in menus that weren’t where it said they were and provided links to irrelevant documentation.<p>It was either useless, actively misleading or extremely motivated to not be turned off.<p>Any of those was reason enough not to use it ever again.

Do you get the same as with the $20&#x2F;month onegoogle subscription?

It&#x27;s not good enough. The place I most want it is in Sheets and it doesn&#x27;t know how to fill in random cells with stuff. It can populate new tables and stuff with example data which is fine as a start but I usually want it to copilot my formulae.<p>It&#x27;s such an obvious use case and Claude 3.5 Sonnet can give me the answer if I paste the header and a value row but Gemini is utterly useless.<p>You&#x27;re in-app. How is a textual copy-paste better in Claude? Useless Google PM. The Oracle Java of AI.

We signed an annual pricing deal in fall and now our price is going up materially <i>during the annual term</i> because of this change, because we didn&#x27;t buy Gemini.

can i get a version of gmail and docs without ai? I had to stop using google keep because they added a flashy AI button that couldn&#x27;t be removed.

Translation: it wasn&#x27;t meeting the daily active users engagement targets, so we need to artificially juice them by forcing it on.

It’s not just that I don’t really need the AI features - it’s also that I actively don’t want to participate in adding to Google’s AI training data.<p>We’ve been happy customers of Workspace for around 16 years - this feels like the straw to break the camel’s back.<p>Strongly hoping there’ll be enough pushback from nervous corporates about data security that they’ll reconsider.

I clicked the button to turn the forced AI crap off today in Gsuite. It has been on for a day (unasked, forced my google). The engineering team responded with a unanimous thumbs up when I told them. Winner of best response was:<p>&quot;oh god! now i have to type complete senten..... zzzzzzzz&quot;

Already had to migrate all my domain&#x27;s off Squarespace and remove Google Workspace entirely when they randomly decided it was now not free and started billing me monthly more than Google Domains did (80% more) Some MBA got a bonus for this surely.<p>I would buy $GOOG stock blindly but being a paid user of theirs blows

Google Workspace still seems like an amazing deal compared to Slack (for example) which is $15&#x2F;month.

I also built a chrome extension that integrates AI into Gmail and Docs but users are not restricted to just one AI model.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chatgptwriter.ai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chatgptwriter.ai</a>

Yea, but we dont have to use their LLM. It can live where it likes but will never have a room in my walled garden.

&quot;We&#x27;ve invested all the money in AI that no one wants, how do we make some of it back?&quot; &quot;Why not raise the price for everyone, whether they use it or not?&quot;

Ugh, we got hit by this. We&#x27;re a non-profit with business plus licenses, so we get a decent discount. I opened a support chat as soon as I got the email about the license changes and price increase. Our contract is due next month, so I need to make sure we&#x27;re OK budget wise. They can&#x27;t even tell me how much our renewal will be yet. They don&#x27;t know.<p>This morning, I logged on to find that the AI features have been turned on domain-wide for us. I couldn&#x27;t find any admin controls, so I opened up a support case. The off buttons are locked behind an enterprise subscription. Our end-users need to turn off smart features to disable Gemini. There&#x27;s no domain-wide &#x2F; admin level control unless you purchase their most expensive licenses. It&#x27;s absolutely disgusting. I&#x27;m so disappointed with how this was rolled out. We should&#x27;ve been given an opportunity to make an informed and intentional decision about how or if we were going to use these features.

Do we know if there&#x27;s a way to opt out of the AI stuff in Gmail and docs? I really don&#x27;t want all this LLM garbage ruining more products.

Business are not willing to pay for Google and Microsoft artificial intelligence so they ramp up the price to everyone and everyone get it &#x27;for free&#x27;.<p>Untill they eventually get hooked on that and then google and Microsoft will once again put that behind a paywall, except now everyone pays more. At least that&#x27;s the plan.<p>Now even if employee don&#x27;t see the benefit of the new deep integrated a.i. and business refuse to pay more for a.i., they aren&#x27;t going to leave anyway because Microsoft is doing just the same as google.<p>That&#x27;s either a win for Google and Microsoft, or at least a neutral outcome.

AI aside, I would pay $20 per month to have Gmail&#x27;s compose UI work correctly in desktop Safari.

Makes sense that this is the only way to compete with Microsoft.<p>(See also how MS attacked Slack by including Teams for “free”.)

I still won&#x27;t enable Gemini

What&#x27;s a good alternative if you just want company emails for a new startup? Zoho?

We&#x27;re shutting down workspace accounts this quarter for this exact reason.

Integration will likely be the biggest growth driver for Gemini, I guess.

That gives a clue of where the money is and what people use more :D

Google can’t charge a premium for a noticeably worse AI product.

i dont&#x27; want any of this garbage in my workspace account

Email is the killer app, and their trying to kill email.

+1 for hosting my own e-mail server. Haven’t looked back.

So, not free and I’m not allowed to say no.

Free, for only $2 per month!<p>Plus Google gets to use your data for training. That has interesting implications. What goes in as training data often comes out later as replies to questions.

What if I don’t want AI in either of those places?

Somebody got a promotion for this change

there&#x27;s so much ai everywhere<p>so i dont wanna pay for it. especially not google, because.. well, im their product.

If I remember correctly, the Office 365 Copilot thing is more of an <i>upsell</i> rather than an upcharge. Basically, if you didn&#x27;t want to pay more, you would initiate the cancellation process, and during that you could &quot;downgrade&quot; to the plan that you already had (without copilot as part of it).<p>Personally, I find that to be especially scummy because it essentially sounds like they are betting on people either not understanding that nuance, or not bothering to deal with it (and subsequently, not using AI, making that venture seem vaguely more profitable)

Pretty simple formula, there simply isn&#x27;t a market for an $x upcharge on mail and docs, but we have to be part of this latest grift so we&#x27;ll charge everyone $x - y which is a rounding error. Except it&#x27;s not. At some point someone is going to admit they have bet the farm on improved auto complete.

Yay now I have to pay more to get bundled features I didn&#x27;t want in the first place. Yay.

Is it just me or is this title a clear contradiction? Free but increases price? Do they mean now included in your cost…which is increasing? Doesn’t have the magic marketing power I suppose.

Perhaps now is the time for me to switch my personal email off Workspace. I don&#x27;t use it for Docs or Drive or anything, only email.<p>Does anyone have experience with Amazon WorkMail or similar, cheaper services for email?

I just saw this. This is probably most useless feature probably nobody asked for except for marketing, to be able to claim they have AI email blah blah.<p>This is getting tiresome.