[sschueller]

I don't understand why Google didn't just continue to grandfather the existing free accounts. They already limited them from changing primary domain and number of users that can exist. Additionally a lot of people (like me) will run out of storage and pay for the extra storage. Run ads in my account for all I care. Why is gmail still free at this point?

Instead they decided that stating "Free forever" doesn't mean forever and screw the people who decided to trust you from day 1.

Yeah, I know it's free and I shouldn't complain but moving email is a huge ordeal and giving me just a few months after 10+ years is a dick move. BTW, I have yet to receive an email from Google telling me that my account will no longer be free. I first heard of this on HN yesterday.

[apfsx]

I couldn't have said it better myself. I've been on the legacy account for a decade and giving us a couple months to migrate is a slap in the face.

I don't want anyone to think that this is just a bunch of people who are upset about paying. I'm not upset about paying. I'm upset about Google promising something and then pulling the rug out from under us. I have multiple Google Workplace accounts for my actual businesses and at the moment I believe I spend $3k-$4k USD per year on all the accounts. My legacy account was used as a family account. After this ordeal, I'm probably switching all my paid workplace accounts to Zoho, Office365 or another provider. Maybe this is the kick in the butt I needed to degoogle my life?

[igetspam]

I've had mine since the days when I worked at Google. It's almost as old as my Gmail account. I'm pretty disappointed. I couldn't care less about docs and whatnot but migrating my email is going to be a PITA.

[blagie]

Docs is a big one for me. I have a decade of documents people shared with me, or that I've shared and published under known links.

If those disappear, a lot of things people count on will implode.

[djhn]

Not to mention that on the free tier the audit reports are limited, and you can't even get a csv of files shared along with who it's shared with.

[blagie]

That's part of an older dick move on Google's part. They made GSuite free intentionally as insecure as possible. That harm the whole internet.

[qwertox]

I simply can't recreate my labels and filter structure on another platform, or even on a personal account, without having some tools.

And I don't know how I can migrate the apps which I've bought.

[culpable_pickle]

Yeah. I just moved my family domain to O365 and I’m planning to migrate the business domains I manage over as well. It’s a much better product for the price and business users will be happy. It’s just been so low priority for me to figure out migrations and with this kick in the pants for the family domain, I have a good story for migrations now.

Honestly I think this will end up proving to be a misstep akin to reader.

[jfengel]

I'm not sure, but given the intermittent grief I've had with this, it seems like they have to pay a team to maintain it. Maybe it's more than just some cheapo storage and CPU time, but a cost to them in maintenance (including unexpected upkeep of seemingly unrelated features).

I can't imagine why that is. You'd think it would be easy. But I've had enough cases where my account wasn't compatible with something (especially my Pixel phone) that makes me suspect that this lets them jettison some of their code base.

[Aloha]

I have run without support for 14 years, I take about as much resources for them as a gmail account.

Move me to the paid version, don't charge me, and then change me 50 bucks every time I need to open up a support case.

But for 50 bucks, I had better be able to get an actual person on the telephone ;-)

[sangnoir]

> I have run without support for 14 years, I take about as much resources for them as a gmail account.

It's may not be about supporting you as a user,but about supporting the feature of a free-tier of features whose users are >99.9% paying customers. I imagine having to pepper "is_billable() && !is_grandfathered()" everywhere gets old, and leads to some subtle bugs/test failures for a feature that's used by 0.03% (a guess) of users, who also happen to be non-paying.

Additionally, at Google's scale, systems interact with each other in non-trivial ways. As a hypothetical, if the CEO/director decrees that all teams should use G-Pay's code & internal infrastructure for all payments (for compliance reasons) by 2023, that may necessitate code & schema changes that do not work with "(mostly) billable customers" because grandfathered accounts may not have a billing method available (which G-Pay systems require); the G-Pay team can't add support for the "billable-customer-but-not-really" feature until the second half of 2024, unless the Workspaces team can just removing an item from the 2022 G-Pay roadmap that's projected to bring in an additional $200M revenue p.a.

Disclaimer: I'm not a Googler, I'm speculating based on my experience in large organizations with intricate cross-dependencies. The Workspace engineers may empathize with you, but their hands are tied,and they can't publicly share the trade-offs that are being made, which is unfortunate.

[compsciphd]

Except, they might be sued now, and it might be significantly more expensive.

They probably forgot what they wrote in their blog post

http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2006/08/google-launches-host...

"Furthermore, organizations that sign up during the beta period will not ever have to pay for users accepted during that period (provided Google continues to offer the service)."

Yes, they can claim they are no longer providing the service, but that's difficult to argue when they are providing a functionally identical service that is just a billing change to cause a "migration".

[Aloha]

Google has had 14+ years to figure a way out of this conundrum, they're a massive corporation with enough resources to literally buy a country. I'm a guy who finds the idea of running email for myself somewhat challenging.

I design and sell software, telling me that Google "doesn't have the resources" to solve this, holds about as much water as a colander.

They could have just moved us up to the starter tier and given us a large enough pricing credit that the billing system will never charge me.

[sangnoir]

> They could have just moved us up to the starter tier and given us a large enough pricing credit that the billing system will never charge me.

They could - but that's still work, and who will go to bat for this when there is other revenue-generating work to be done? "I kept non-paying-users from having to pay" isn't exactly promotion-packet material.

I commiserate with you - I too have a grandfathered domain (or 2), but 10+ years of ad-free services (email, Docs, GCloud, etc) for free in exchange for being Guinea pigs for a bit is a fantastic deal. Our utility as early-adopters was valuable at the start - now we're a disposable inconvenience. A vanishingly small number of "Free for life" deals are honored for life.

Edit:

> I design and sell software, telling me that Google "doesn't have the resources" to solve this, holds about as much water as a colander.

You misunderstand me: Google has the resources move every single paying customer to the free tier - if they choose to, but that is unlikely. They are equally unlikely to do replace revenue-generating work with something that doesn't move the needle: it's a question of motivation, not resources. For the software you design and sell, would you prioritize a feature only used by someone you donated your software to over your paying customers?

[Aloha]

FWIW, I think I may have solved the mystery why some of us legacy users have not been notified.

http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2006/08/google-launches-host...

"A standard edition of Google Apps for Your Domain is available today as a beta product without cost to domain administrators or end users. Key features include 2 gigabytes of email storage for each user, easy to use customization tools, and help for administrators via email or an online help center. Furthermore, organizations that sign up during the beta period will not ever have to pay for users accepted during that period (provided Google continues to offer the service)."

The original version of the TOS from August 2006 read as follows:

https://web.archive.org/web/20061029132431/https://www.googl...

"16. Modification. Except as provided in Section 17, Google reserves the right to change or modify any of the terms and conditions contained in this Agreement or any policy governing Google Apps, at any time, by posting the new agreement at http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/terms.html or such URL as Google may provide. Customer is responsible for regularly reviewing any updates to this Agreement. Any changes or modifications to this Agreement will become binding (i) when made in a writing executed by both parties, (ii) by Customer's online acceptance of updated terms, or (iii) after Customer's continued use of Google Apps after such terms have been updated by Google."

"17. No Fees. Provided that Google continues to offer Google Apps for Your Domain to Customer, Google will continue to provide a version of Google Apps for Your Domain (with substantially the same services as those provided as of the Effective Date) free of charge to Customer; provided that such commitment (i) applies only to End User Accounts created during the period when the Google Hosted Services are considered a beta service (the "Beta Period") by Google (such Beta Period determination at Google's sole discretion) and (ii) may not apply to new opt-in services added by Google to the Google Apps for Your Domain in the future. For sake of clarity, Google reserves the right to offer a premium version of Google Apps for Your Domain for a fee."

In mid 2007 the language was changed to read the following:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070407174217/http://www.google...

"17. Modification. Except as provided in Section 18, Google reserves the right to change or modify any of the terms and conditions contained in this Agreement or any policy governing the Service, at any time, by posting the new agreement at http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/terms.html or such URL as Google may provide. Customer is responsible for regularly reviewing any updates to this Agreement. Any changes or modifications to this Agreement will become binding (i) when made in a writing executed by both parties, (ii) by Customer's online acceptance of updated terms, or (iii) after Customer's continued use of the Service after such terms have been updated by Google."

"18. Fees. Provided that Google continues to offer the Service to Customer, Google will continue to provide a version of the Service (with substantially the same services as those provided as of the Effective Date) free of charge to Customer; provided that such commitment: (i) does not apply to the Domain Service described in Section 4 above; and (ii) may not apply to new opt-in services added by Google to the Service in the future. For sake of clarity, Google reserves the right to offer a premium version of the Service for a fee."

This version was persisting thru at least March of 2011:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110330181415/http://www.google...

However by December of 2011, that language was gone:

https://web.archive.org/web/20111231230542/http://www.google...

[kashmirix]

Nope, this doesn't work this way. Google's model includes various licensing options, including free accounts for nonprofits and educational institutions, special licences for government bodies, various levels of business/enterprise licensing, and so on. Trust me, licence checks take place at each login to a Google service, and maintaining the code is absolutely not an issue.

[sschueller]

They are migrating everyone to the same system as the paid one and deferring payment for a month. So to me it sounds like a flag.

[labster]

It sounds to me like a false flag. Free for life*! (* mayfly lifetime)

Time to degoogle my life. Google giveth and Google taketh, and Google discontinueth after years twain or so.

[frosted-flakes]

It's been a lot more than two years though, it's closer to 15.

[bener]

Wouldn't it be running on the same setup as their paid offerings? It's the same thing, just with limitations.

[jfengel]

It's the limitations that cost money. They are code and might require maintenance.

It doesn't seem like it would, but I have found myself in plenty of situations where I couldn't give an "easy" feature or fix an "easy" bug because of some design choice that was riddled throughout the code. No idea what it might be, but I could take guesees.

The maintenance cost is probably small for them, but not to support a customer paying zero.

[kashmirix]

Come on. They have long offered free Workspace for nonprofits and for some schools. This is not going away, and support for various licensing scenarios is certainly there in the code.

[bener]

Interesting, thanks.

[GauntletWizard]

Having been the administrator for these, there was real cost to maintaining all the weird SKUs that Google Apps for Your Domain (which dates when this was) had at the time. It was not unthoughtof, but it also wasn't huge - and this SKU was not among the problem SKUs.

[pdonis]

> moving email is a huge ordeal

Since the email in question is <something>@<yourdomain>.com, can't you just add a forward for that email address to some other non-Google email at whatever hosting provider you use for <yourdomain>.com? Then the email address itself would still work, it just wouldn't go to the broken Google account.

[sjs382]

A lot of us have other stuff that it's unclear how we migrate. YouTube premium subscriptions, Google Voice, YouTube channels, "sign in with Google", Google play purchases, the list is endless...

Some of it includes pricing/specific products you can't sign up for any more, either.

I'd be happy if there was a way to migrate my account as is, with everything in tact to a regular@gmail account.

[alar44]

The article specifically states you won't lose access to anything you've paid for and you'll still be able to authenticate with that account. You just can't use it for mail, calendar, drive, etc. Just repoint your email to another service, export your calendar, and move your data somewhere else.

Considering GSuite is pretty much hot garbage in 2022, they're almost doing you a favor. Seriously, this is good for you. It'll be like you've been transported to the future!

[nqzero]

in what way is gsuite garbage ? granted, i mostly just use gmail. but after a few years at [major company], gmail seems light years ahead of anything they use

[Aloha]

I'm also still waiting to be told that it wont be free any longer.

Maybe the oldest accounts will be exempted, maybe those with the least activity will be, who knows, I cant even find the KB article indicating that an upgrade must happen anymore.

[bubblethink]

Here's the article: https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217?product_name=UnuFl...

[Kye]

>> "After 60 days in suspension, you will no longer have access to Google Workspace core services, such as Gmail, Calendar, and Meet. You may still retain access to additional Google services, such as YouTube and Google Photos."

This suggests authentication and external stuff that depends on it will still work.

[prometheanfire]

"suggests" is not good enough, google needs an offical migration document or tool.

[culpable_pickle]

My notice ended up in the spam folder…

[brightball]

Not to mention the number of places where I’ve been using “Sign in with Google” from that account.

[brnt]

> moving email is a huge ordeal

Well, is it? Having your own domain makes it a little easier, doesn't it? Find an alternate service, update a handful of DNS entries, presto. Optionally use one of the various IMAP backup tools to move your mail. It's actually quite easy, IMHO.

[snielson]

I can confirm that moving email is the easiest of all the migration tasks. I connected my Google account and a destination email account to Outlook and moved all my email in less than 5 minutes.

[djhn]

Exactly the same situation. I haven't received any communication from Google about this.

I only have 1 user (a restriction which was already in force at the time I registered for the free tier), so I'm wondering whether this even applies to me?

[midrus]

And this is why any google product can't be trusted.

[dwild]

Let me correct you, this is why any FREE product can't be trusted.

I can't understands how people can expect free stuff to be forever... even more so here in Hacker News.

[midrus]

So if they come tomorrow and say now in order to keep using your @gmail.com account you now have to pay $100 a month, that would be ok for you?

Of course they can do that too. But this is clearly screwing up people, as it is not easy to change a lifetime email address.

If they say I cannot store my photos anymore, that's fine. I can move them. Changing an email address is not an easy thing to do. Or losing all your Google play purchases.

But yeah, at the end of the day nobody is forced to do anything for free (despite nothing google offers being free, as they sell ads with my data) but this shows just how you cannot trust anything from Google.

Personally my solution to this will be to pay for iCloud and move everything over there. I had planned moving to iPhone for privacy reasons anyway, so this is just another nail on the coffin for using any Google service ever again.

[dwild]

> So if they come tomorrow and say now in order to keep using your @gmail.com account you now have to pay $100 a month, that would be ok for you?

Where did I say any of this was ok? I'm saying you simply can't trust them. You can't expect to cost something to someone and trust that they will keep doing that forever. A business need to make money...

> as they sell ads with my data

They didn't over G Suite legacy. Sure at least if there's ads you know they may make a bit of money, can you trust it's enough to cover what you cost them? That's a whole other story certainly, but for sure you can't trust that if you literally bring no monetary value for them.

> this shows just how you cannot trust anything from Google.

I'll again correct you, can't trust anything free.

[pykiss]

Yes. It's not about money, it's about trust.

[belter]

Google is very far from a philanthropic organization, and these are not free accounts. They are free to the users and paid by the companies using Google Ads.

[PenguinCoder]

GMAIL is still free because of the wealth of information it gives them. Being able to scrape emails for products, services, travel etc, all help Google sell more ads.

[dkjaudyeqooe]

What's stopping them doing that with these accounts? It would be perfectly reasonable.

[dwild]

The maintenance cost per user is much higher.

I also feel like this is not that much a matter of cash but mostly a matter of having to consider Legacy accounts each time they want to do anything over Google Workspace. It's just more trouble for nothing at all at the end.