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Google Axes Free Google Apps For Businesses
New submitter Macfox writes "In a move to focus on serving small business better, Google has axed the popular free edition of Google Apps for businesses. From Dec 6th, it will not be possible to sign up for the free edition. In a statement to the Wall Street Journal, Google's senior vice president in charge of Google Apps said Google wants to provide small businesses that use the free version of the software with dedicated customer support — something only paying customers currently get. 'We're not serving them well,' he said of the free users."
Google's blog post notes that "this change has no impact on our existing customers, including those using the free version."
We are now charging you more...
Seriously?
"In a move to focus on serving small business better,..."
How the hell have we gotten to a place where this sort of thing can be said with a straight face?
you aren't the product, you're the customer. A brave new world for Google!
Google's blog post notes that "this change has no impact on our existing customers, including those using the free version."
I used to run all my own email etc. on a server in my house, but a year or so ago I moved it all onto a 'google apps for business' account. Since then, my kids and wife have all started using google stuff much more often and it's hugely useful for us to be able to collect all that under accounts tied to the family google apps domain.
Google should do something family-related in this area, they could cut out 95% of the features of apps for business, but the most useful stuff is creating sites, sharing docs and drive between members and most importantly for me to be able to manage the accounts of all of us. There are alternatives, but this is a nice setup which works well.
I have been a free Google Apps user for years and I've never had any issues with it. The lack of support hasn't ever bothered me. I've helped several other people sign up for the free version as well and no support has ever been needed for them either. This is just a case where the free version was good enough and was keeping people for signing up for the paid version. It's always about the money. They have been thinking about killing this service for while now. When I originally signed up, I had access to 100 address. Soon after the limit had been dropped to 50 and then to 10 accounts. I think when the service launched, there was no limit on accounts.
Work smarter, not harder.
What I'm not entirely clear about is what happens to the middle ground of people who own their own domain and want to be able to have email address for each member of their family linked to the various Google services.
If they are now trying to push those people onto the business tier then a family of 4 with 2 grand-parents each side is going to cost $400 a year - which is way too expensive to properly consider.
(I'm thankful I set my family up several years ago before they reduced the number of users from 50 to 10)
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Probably can't squeeze any more out the advertising and advertising rates a falling. Android is a money pit. They will have to find new ways of making money.
I run my one-man show and I've been using google apps for 2-3 years. That directly led to my decision to get an android phone due to its seamless workflow. Gmail, google voice, etc all works without much setup. I don't know if this announcement will affect those apps I rely, but this sounds like a dickish move.
It's based on a business technique that's as old as the hills: Give away free stuff to crush the competition until people become dependent on your free stuff, then you put on the squeeze. Google is just a private company trying to make money, not freaking Santa Clause
I was able to register for a single-user free account this morning by doing this.
http://www.labnol.org/internet/google-apps-free/26926/
How to Get the Free Edition of Google Apps
Alternatively, here’s a quick and simple workaround that will still let you sign-up for the free edition of Google Apps even though Google has officially retired the free edition – all you need is a free Gmail or Google account.
Go to appengine.google.com, sign-in with your Google Account and create a new Application. You may fill in any dummy date and click the “Create Application” button.
Open the “Dashboard” and on the next screen, click the link that says “Application Settings.”
Scroll down a little (refer to the video tutorial) and choose “Add Domain” to associate a domain with your App Engine application.
That’s it. Now you should see a special link* to sign-up for the free edition of Google Apps. You may either use your existing domain or buy one through Google Apps.
[*] You have to access this link through App Engine as Google Apps checks the HTTP Referrer information before serving up the sign-up page for the free edition of Google Apps.
So if somebody wanted to do this themselves is there a way to self host this kind of Integrated Stack??
I like the concept of EyeOS but that seems to be a Dead Project
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
The page currently has a cryptic entry "Google Applications for Personal Use" without any "learn more" which the business and educational versions have. Since many individuals use google apps for their email for a personal domain (for example with WordPress) I hope that a free perosnal version will be available.
'We're not serving them well,' he said of the free users.
Well, now they won't be able to serve them at all.
Considering they built their model on analyzing all of your content and selling that information - now they are making you pay for the privilege - seems like they are having their cake and eating it too.
One morning a couple of months, App Engine went down. Here's how Google "supported" the situation:
- Community support had already been pushed to Stack Overflow, out of all places. Of course the mods there had never heard of any arrangements with Google and modded out any questions relating to ops or outages. Like they should, to maintain the integrity of their site. Later I posted a question re: the situation with a Silicon Valley Google Dev community forum that's run by Google dev advocates. No response.
- Paid subscribers of GAE were just as hosed as their support portal went down with GAE. Except they got to pay for the privilege.
How soon for Gmail or other services to follow this route?
Really it's the correct path: give something away free to get clients, then start charging when competitors are mostly dead. No real surprise.
Anything is possible given time and money.
Yeh, but if they have to charge for this service, rather than advertising or something similar.
And if they use double speak, this PR is clearly double speak (presenting a service become paid only as an improvement to give support, but if it was an improvement enough to justify the price, then they'd offer the service as *optionally* paid if you *want* support).
Thus how long before they IMPROVE it further and existing customers GET TO ENJOY THE 'IMPROVEMENT'.
It means I'll start looking around now. Quite frankly, I like that I have my own domain, but I don't like the adverts Google shoves at me, or that they mine the emails to serve me adverts, then serve me the same adverts outside my emails. Sometimes to other people on my NAT.
I'm using gmail with my own domain and if I was paying for that service I'd be bloody p1ssd, as it is I'm already thinking its too much just to host my emails even with the adverts problems.
I think this marks the time to move it to my own domain properly and try and end that mail service working.
I have a really small biz and just use the Apps email as I like the web interface instead of the local pop client thing.. Even though thats all I use, it is critically important to my tiny web biz.. I really cant afford to wake up to no biz email which might not be whats happening today..but looks like the direction its headed. I guess I will be doing some MX updating and either use the roundcube/squirrel that my webhost provides or break out the local email client.. it was good while it lasted..
Ookay, this sounds like corporate speak. Translation: This is costing us more money than we are earning through ad-based revenue so we have to transition to a non-free model. This has absolutely zilch to do with providing adequate customer support.
Well, I didn't see this coming, but now that it's happened I'll be looking at possible replacements. I love the gmail interface, and it's the only thing I'm interested in (don't care about docs, etc). I imagine there will be some competitors come and break Google's stronghold on web email now though, particularly in managing your own domain for free
As a web designer I have always recommended customers use Google Apps for their Email instead of the web host, CPanel or whatever.
Lots of benefits.
- Apps interface way better than whatever most typical hosts offer.
- If the host goes offline your email still works.
- Great mobile support.
- List goes on.
However most small businesses spend maybe $10-$15 / month on web hosting (Dreamhost, GoDaddy, most Cpanel hosts etc..).
And they might have 5-10 email accounts which you can always setup free at the host.
So $50/year per email account on Google Apps is suddenly WAY OUT OF THE BALLPARK. A small busness with 10 email accounts would be paying Google $500 / year for Email .. and only $120 / year for Web Hosting which always includes Email (albeit not as good).
It should be ~ $50 / year for a Google Apps account that supports 10 users ... that is market bearable for a small business who's pricing expectations are set by the shared hosting company.
Why even use google apps in the first place? These apps are so damn primitive. LibreOffice and even OpenOffice are better alternatives. There is so much free software for both linux and windows desktops that put's these google and microsoft apps to shame. Business wants E-mail for their users either pay for the gmail or create gmail accounts for each of their employees for free, fuck company domain name. Or purchase exchange but it's expensive and not sure about linux alternatives.
Cloud will never get bigger because the majority of the country still uses those ripoff, crappy, internet services such as TWC and comcast, both complete shit. This is why we need the government(fiber wire all over) to layout the internet backbone and not private businesses.
Moved all my business off Google and avoid their services (easier than you think) since I found out they are tax dodging scumbags.
Exactly. I run several hobbyist sites for gaming and such. I don't run ads, I don't charge for it, it's just for fun for games I play. The free version of Google Apps was absolutely perfect for us as a free alternative to paying for hosting our own e-mail services. Plus, everyone was pretty much familiar with the Gmail interface. I've set up several gaming "guilds" with basic sites and e-mail addresses.
Back when you could have up to 50 or so accounts, this was absolutely perfect. When they reduced it to 10, that put a serious dent in our ability to host all but the smallest of our guilds. Now that it's zero, well, I suppose I'll be finding and alternate solution because I simply cannot afford $50 per user per year for something that's just a hobby.
I don't understand why Google doesn't come up with some happy medium. For example, have a more limited free tier, something that allows you to manage 50 or 100 free e-mail accounts and calendars (with Google ads on them) with access to Gtalk, a total of 100 Google Docs (or 10 MB or some other limitation), and a few pages. If you want all of the full suite of hosting services, access to discussion groups, metrics, advertising, a larger site layout, etc. then you charge the $50 per user per year.
As it is, might get Google a few more paying customers, but more likely than not, it will just drive a lot of people away from Google and to another service. That's too bad, because I'd really like to continue using Google for these groups I set up.
Google is slowly but surely staying away from its original path.
At least they're not a monopoly in domain email services, both outlook and yandex provide domain email services(With much greater number of emails then 10 free user google apps before they shut it down) though i preferred google...
Seriously, if you are a small business who cannot afford to spend $50 a year for each employee how the hell are you still in business, and maybe you should rethink your entire internet strategy.
Perhaps the author of the summary to exercise a bit more "journalistic integrity"....
Evolution: love it or leave it
$50 / year for a google apps account that supports 10 users! I would pay for that. No question.
The big problem here is that Google is commingling all their services and there is only one level of payment, for example, they announced a few days ago the distribution of Android applications for your business using the Google Play infrastructure, for that, you need a Google Apps domain, so If you have all other services covered, for example you have your email infrastructure already in place (where you can have intranet only email accounts and public accounts something impossible with Google Apps) then you still have to pay 50$/year per user to distribute Android applications using their service and you don't use email, chat, docs. This is wrong!
I'm curious how this will affect businesses that are currently using postini. Since google is moving postini functionality into google apps, does this mean a business will now have to sign up for google apps to continue using any postini features?
It seems that google has been fairly quiet about exactly what the postini shutdown means for business, and I've only found vague talk of how a business is supposed to transition to google to continue the service. Especially businesses that do not use gmail, but use their own mail servers.
Users that can not afford it can still use the emails hosted on their servers from gmail and benefit from gmails spam filters for free.
I am doing this right now and I have emails from different domains inside my gmail account for free.
Just like drug dealers.
Seeing the words "Google" and "customer support" in the same sentence is amusing.
I think that this move will not bring the intended effect on Google's bottom line. The core user that is affected by this change is the enthusiast, setting up a custom domain for email for their family, opensource project, etc. This enthusiast user was advocating the Google services. I count myself as one such user whose recommendations has led at least 3 new small business customers for Google. Also their decisions to use Android over the competing platforms.
Now Google loses all of that. And since it is highly unlikely that they will discontinue their free Gmail, Calendar, Drive offerings the end of free custom domain accounts is unlikely to save them any money on hosting and will represent a net loss to them in the long run.
Sure the mail is relatively reliable the the control tools fairly simple to use. A lot of hassles are taken out of my hands definitely.
However when there is an actual genuine issue, getting them to look at it, it's not a quick fix. It took a 50-> 100 reply thread, nearly a year before they finally fixed up the 'last logged in' display time in the console so you could actually identify when users were using the system or not. It was set to a US based time if I recall, despite Googles other services supporting international time zones relatively fine.
A lot of whining was needed to finally get a response. I dread to think how long it would take a very nasty issue to be ironed out? Perhaps only a 500 reply thread and 12 weeks?
Also, the latency from Google to Australia for hosted mail? Yeah, not really making for responsive mailboxes. Admitedly not their fault directly, I made the choice to use it.
More accurately would be "To better serve you, we aren't accept new users that are a net cost of resources." The people that this is to serve better are current users, and the change affects new users (who will no longer be able to sign up for the free tier.)
Can you elaborate? Not very clear on what you mean.
Right, because the common phrase is "broke like Google", not "fat Google money".
Oh, wait...
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
On the other hand you could have licensing like Oracle or Microsoft, where there are consultants who do nothing but answer the question of what license you need.
Let me also take a wild guess and say that this is also probably not a huge issue for you, you're just bitching because something changed. Remind me, what does it cost to develop for APPL?
As a web designer I have always recommended customers use Google Apps for their Email instead of the web host, CPanel or whatever.
Lots of benefits.
- Apps interface way better than whatever most typical hosts offer.
- If the host goes offline your email still works.
- Great mobile support.
- List goes on.
However most small businesses spend maybe $10-$15 / month on web hosting (Dreamhost, GoDaddy, most Cpanel hosts etc..).
And they might have 5-10 email accounts which you can always setup free at the host.
So $50/year per email account on Google Apps is suddenly WAY OUT OF THE BALLPARK. A small busness with 10 email accounts would be paying Google $500 / year for Email .. and only $120 / year for Web Hosting which always includes Email (albeit not as good).
It should be ~ $50 / year for a Google Apps account that supports 10 users ... that is market bearable for a small business who's pricing expectations are set by the shared hosting company.
I 100% Agree. I'm not sure what to offer my clients now.
The majority of the phishing attacks that my organization receives comes in a google docs link.
I hope this policy makes creating dummy accounts for phishing much harder.
Small teams, very small business and community projects will be greatly screwed over by this. Many can't really afford or has enough money to spare for this. I am part of 2 business that uses google apps. If the free version hadn't existed, neither of them would ever have moved on to the paid one. Sad move by google.
There is a workaround through which one can access the free google apps again. It uses the google app engine. The free version is still available for developers, for exact details, browse the Knolzone blog. This link should help you all.
http://knolzone.com/how-to-get-google-apps-for-free-despite-google-removing-the-free-edition/