[yebyen]

Sorry. If your business is built on marking up and reselling free things, I can't feel sorry for you. That was one of those reflex apologies. Not a real apology.

If your clients have waited until 2 weeks before Christmas to sign, then they are actually the bad guys and they deserve to pay more. When exactly are you supposed to do your gift shopping?

[rprasad]

Heavens forbid that someone try to make a living providing cost-efficient technical solutions like a website and email to non-tech-saavy small businesses!

[yebyen]

Cry me a river! Cost-efficient != free electricity and high-availability networking. I'm sure it was great while it lasted. Google have not actively shut anybody down.

If you want efficiency, buy low power machines and cobble together what services you need with free software. You can have RoundCube up and running in a matter of a few hours. I don't know any other webmail providers that provide SMTP, POP3, and IMAP for free. Those are all value-adds.

How much do you think that's worth? Would you include free support and maintenance if they were your machines and the setup charge did not fully pay for them? Do you think that it would be sustainable to do that?

Have you heard that it takes money to make money? If these businesses wanted to grow past 25 employees, they had to be prepared to move to a paying plan anyway. Those of us who were grandfathered in have obviously dodged a bullet. I can tell you that I've run mail servers on small machines for groups of users ~=25 before, and it's not very hard, but today I have free hosted Google Apps and therefore I want no part in it anymore.

Thanks, Google!

[yebyen]

(For the record, I am running my own mail server, but I'm not currently accepting applications for new accounts. I will be sad when I want to grow past 25 users if it means I need to start paying $5/mo for each of them, because I never learned to scale on my own.)