[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...

[jfengel]

That's interesting. My account does date from July 2006 (I still have the emails in the archive!)

[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.