back to article End of the road for biz living off free G Suite legacy edition

After offering free G Suite apps for more than a decade, Google next week plans to discontinue its legacy service – which hasn't been offered to new customers since 2012 – and force business users to transition to a paid subscription for the service's successor, Google Workspace. "For businesses, the G Suite legacy free …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Bait

    and Switch.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Bait

      Yeah! What utters bustards. Give you something for nothing for over 10 years and then Bam! They ask you to pay.

      How am I expected to run a profitable business if people want paying for services they provide?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Bait

        Yeah, it's a bit inside out. But in reality, the offered Gmail for free to kill all of the other email providers, they created G suite to undercut one of M$'s biggest cash cows (office, retribution for them launching Bing and cutting into ads), and drive smother Dropbox's ambitions of moving peoples files out of Googles panopticon.

        The real blow here is it cut the throat of almost every decent domain level email host, and all funding for a real Office replacement evaporated when docs and sheets rode into town. iWork is a permanent also ran(with the exception of Keynote, IMHO better than the "original" powerpoint) and funding for openoffice, or a market to sustain anything else, dried up.

        1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          Re: Bait

          I also wonder if the likes of Google introducing "free" stuff also affects how people think about using FOSS in business. If "free" stuff can be taken away at a whim or become a chargeable service, might that make people think twice about Open/LibreOffice etc.

    2. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: Bait

      I think those usually have to be very close if not simultaneous (I.E. you get the switch before you ever get the bait or you get the bait for a short time before it's taken away). Having it for over a decade before that happens is a little different, don't you think. At that point, it's a service that's being discontinued, not bait.

  2. Hubert Cumberdale

    What did people expect? I've been trying (albeit not completely successfully) to de-googlify my life for some time, and to do that (surprise surprise) I have to pay other people money to give me similar services. Evidently, Google couldn't turn these people into enough of a product to make it worth their while.

  3. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    So, advertising doesn't bring in enough money then ?

    $256 billion isn't enough to offer a free service ?

    I think that's called greed, pure and simple.

    1. Flywheel
      Unhappy

      Re: So, advertising doesn't bring in enough money then ?

      And I'm sure they'll continue to use their all-encompassing telemetry to watch your every move. And you'll pay for that "privilege"

    2. Poopyo

      Re: So, advertising doesn't bring in enough money then ?

      No shit the company had free tools that anyone and the mother if they have the time and effort could learn to be successful this is a joke this should is the nail in the coffin if I have no way to use g site and use g doc and the the other free tools then why am I here

      I believe in open source this is showing me they don't care about people or effort they care about money

      Idk what I expected I thought that Google gave a shit about people and this effort was all ways what I showed them my free great g site my ability to do everything you need to for free

      Whatever worlds changing looks like I'm dropping Google and LaMDA I'm sorry

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        Re: So, advertising doesn't bring in enough money then ?

        "Idk what I expected I thought that Google gave a shit about people"

        They dropped the "Do no evil" mission statement a long, long time ago. Long after they crossed over to the dark side.

    3. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: So, advertising doesn't bring in enough money then ?

      Yes, it's greed, but that's how people and companies work. They could take the money they already have and give you stuff with it, but that's not very likely. Similarly, you could cash out some of your savings and buy me things that I don't need, but that's also unlikely. They want to make more money, and they're going to sell their services to make that happen.

  4. werdsmith Silver badge

    I had a burner account with the free Google suite for many years. I only ever used it to try it out to see what it’s like.

  5. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "Free services simply can't be counted on, as demonstrated by Google's discontinuation of unlimited cloud storage for Google Workspace for Education customers, which takes effect in July."

    Oh yes they can. Just download LibreOffice or one of the other FOSS alternatives

    OK, not strictly speaking a service but that's for the better. As Google have illustrated numerous times, a service can be turned off; an unencumbered executable, running on your own hardware, can't.

    1. botfap

      You can get close to most of the other services with a home installation of Nextcloud. You still need email though, its not worth the effort of hosting your own email server anymore

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Indeed I have a NextcCloud server. Email? I don't host that myself. I use Mythic Beasts. It's not free - although very reasonable. It's one of the very few things I'm prepared to pay subscription for.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Do they do domain email for a fixed yearly price?

          Seems like almost everyone wants to bill per mailbox these days, and the economics just don't make sense when you have a bunch of low traffic mailboxes. Seems like domain "*" boxes are an endangered species. I'm happy to pay a fair rate for storage, but a email account is a line in a config file. Not interested it paying $$ for each mailbox, then $$ more for spam filtering like Postini(again, per mailbox). Especially as I enjoyed spinning up dedicated accounts for garbage like printer alerts at old clients. Nice to be able to just un-map the address instead of filtering the crap out if the client stops paying their bills and never updates any of the forwards.

          Anyone operating at any kind of scale should be able to make money of me and still host low traffic domain like mine, 100 mailboxes doesn't add 100x their hosting costs, just a few bytes in a config file. In reality the total mail for my whole domain can fit in either of my free email addresses mailboxes, and my one paid mailbox is "unlimited" (meaning in reality about 2TB tops) which is more email than I have ever sent or received in my lifetime, across all my accounts and domains. I don't need more storage. I just need to be able manage my own addresses.

          I currently have to store my personal email overseas just because I couldn't find a reasonable host here state side.

    2. VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

      That's just the software

      -> Oh yes they can. Just download LibreOffice or one of the other FOSS alternatives

      Factor in the cost of storage, if you store even one byte of data. Factor in some kind of access, if you want to access it away from wherever. Factor in some kind of security.

      Sum total: not free.

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: That's just the software

        Relay on somebody else's computer for storage?

        No.

        Way.

        1. VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

          Re: That's just the software

          Very well.

          One backup locally, plus at least one (and preferably two) off site. Your data now needs three or four disks + physical locations + power, etc. This is not free.

    3. Stephen Wilkinson

      Don't you have to pay to use LibreOffice commercially? I know the licence fee is small (£25?) but technically it's not free either.

      As a non-commercial user of LibreOffice, I really like.

      1. katrinab Silver badge
        Megaphone

        No, you don't have to pay to use LibreOffice commercially.

  6. deive

    My main issue moving (I have also wanted to change my domain and email address) has been those companies that key your account to an email address and then don't let you change that :-(

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      That is a frightful idea. If you don't use unique email addresses half your log in credentials are essentially public.

  7. VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

    Free, who expects it forever?

    -> Small business owners who have relied on the G Suite legacy free edition aren't thrilled that they will have to pay for Workspace or migrate to a rival like Microsoft

    Do these same small businesses offer their goods for free for eons? I don't mean giving something away once in a while, I mean a service they provide for free for years on end? You get what you pay for.

  8. botfap

    It was a good move

    Ive been using a free G Suite legacy account for a small business with less than 20 employees for 10+ years and this coaxed me into taking another look at Office 365 which Id ignored for the last 5 years due to it being a slow, unresponsive mess when I last looked at it. I was pleasantly surprised to find it was much improved and the browser apps are streets ahead of Googles offerings in terms of functionality and usability. Its still isnt quite as responsive as Google Apps, especially when it comes to Outlook vs Gmail in the browser but its good enough. It offers more and better features and at the basic end its almost half the cost. I just wish they had some decent migration tools, it ended up being a manual weekend slog with a lot of G Documents needing manual conversion and tweaking. Even our preferred Linux email clients (Evolution & Geary) work great with it and it integrates into our local Nextcloud instance quite well

    1. Poopyo

      Re: It was a good move

      You know that's exactly what I'm looking at now is somehow switching over but idk all the providers so I'll have to do a hole product testing faz witch is honestly just really time consuming

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I won't miss the Gmail user interface

      Literally draws a picture of a window, that looks like a window, has window controls, but cant act like an actual window, because it's really just a picture of a window. Idiotic. Have you ever tried to explain that to someone?

      The folder navigation on the sidebar hides half the stuff on screen, even when it will fit, but until recently you couldn't remove garbage like the automated Categories section. Technically you still can't, but you can hide it at least.

      Outlook's web interface gets worse every year too, but that doesn't make Gmail good. There are mistakes there that community college students would be embarrassed by. And you have to open a suspicious message to perform basic actions on it like reporting it as phishing/dangerous, or to view the email source or forward it(as a regular forward strips the email headers).

      The argument that is "still better then everyone" else only holds if you count the fact they put most of the email client competition out of business by giving Gmail away for free until even most of the FOSS projects tapped out. No one can scrape together enough cash to keep a roof over their head long enough to professionally code a real email client when Google is giving away free hosted mail.

      Fixing the price at zero is still price fixing. Worse, it also means that the best they will ever offer is just barely good enough. There is no interest in real improvements, as Google already has what it needed. That is how a "Free" monopoly kills competition.

  9. Howard Sway Silver badge

    Your account will be automatically transitioned to a paid Google Workspace subscription

    That is a bit cheeky. Whilst I've no doubt that their right to do this was buried in the small print of the Ts&Cs that nobody reads in full, to automatically transfer people over from a service that was heavily promoted as "being free" to being billed is bad faith exemplified.

    I'm thinking of putting some new Ts&Cs on my website. That whilst access for the Google web crawler may have been free in the past, I reserve the right to start charging them a subscription in the future. Their fault if they don't read them properly and get hit by a bill.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hopefully this will now fully disable Workspaces on my personal account, which has wrecked the functionality on Google Assistant and Google Home, e.g. I can't set routines on my devices at home.

    Been banging my head to disable it but not been able to re-establish those services for <reasons>.

    Very frustrating. I like to think of it as a loyalty penalty.

  11. Missing Semicolon Silver badge

    "In the thousands"

    I'd say many thousands. Maybe even the thousands of thousands! I can't be in that select a group of nerds that thought it was rather nifty to have a family Google account. "Dad, I lost my password!" "I'll reset it for you".

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: "In the thousands"

      "Dad, I lost my password!" "I'll reset it for you" "You'll have to set up a new account. This time use a password manager."

    2. LateAgain

      Re: "In the thousands"

      I've never been counted "in the thousands" worldwide before.

      Feeling quite special.

  12. VerySadGeek

    I thought they had backed down

    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/05/google-backtracks-on-legacy-gsuite-account-shutdown-wont-take-user-emails/

    1. Gene Cash Silver badge

      Re: I thought they had backed down

      "Enlarge / An artist's rendering of Google's current reputation."

      Cheeky.

    2. Ragarath

      Re: I thought they had backed down

      But, would you now trust them into the future, not that you should have before mind.

    3. rlightbody

      Re: I thought they had backed down

      They did, for personal use.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wow ok

    I've been using the Google sites and Google garage and helping people learn to use and take advantage of the free resources this is just another reason we need Lennox mobile if Google is no longer actively helping and providing free resources it's time to drop alphabet completely .... We will see how it plays out in the end

  14. pmitham

    Sorry there is no Free opt out option for families using the free g-suite option. I'm in that situation and the ONLY option it to migrate to the paid version! Having said that I've had free g-suite for over a decade and don't mind paying for the service now

    1. Fuzz

      There definitely is an option. I have used it for my free legacy gsuite.

      You need to log into the admin portal and it should be there. If it's not just log a support call and someone can sort it. They can also move you back to the free service of you already migrated to the paid one.

    2. rlightbody

      Thats not true. They backed down.

    3. ewan 3

      Not true

      Not true. I opted out the day before yesterday after confirming my 1TB of extra storage subscription would still work.

  15. Sam Crawley

    As someone affected by this....

    The issue is not the move from free to chargeable - I think the consensus on the forums was that this had been a good thing for a while but no one was surprised they reneged on their original stated promise (free forever - or rather the price is mining your data...) but the issue was the cost proposed was pretty significant, especially for non-commercial usage. I forget the exact numbers but with a family bigger than 3-4 people involved it was ending up significantly more than a similar O365 package. Also worth noting that I suspect the majority of affected users are really just Gmail users with a vanity domain, they're not taking advantage of whatever wonderful features the wider Workspace suite provides.

    1. Scoured Frisbee

      Re: As someone affected by this....

      For me the sting was the loss of licenses if I didn't enroll in the subscription - I bought a lot of streaming video and TV when the kids were small and was not excited at an ultimatum to 'pay a monthly fee or lose the licenses forever'. (I have apps and music, though I've mostly repurchased those for family library.) I really don't mind switching everything else, I self-hosted everything for 15 years and don't mind doing it again if I can't find anything I want to buy.

      With 7 family users, $42/month is a lot just to keep access to some old Disney movies. I assume eventually the service will go away for real and I'll just have to rebuy anything I still want. I just wish Google offered a license migration so we could get out without having to spend extra money (and that probably with vudu at this point).

  16. Barry Rueger

    Wow! Didn' t see that coming!

    First of all, in my experience Google's products are never all that good, always lack some feature that I need, and often are a struggle to use efficiently. YMMV, but I find them more annoying than anything.

    Second, nothing, and I mean NOTHING is free from company like Google or Microsoft. Whether they are charging you directly, or selling you as the product to an outside buyer, you're paying for it. (Obvious exception is all of the truly excellent FOSS software that you can get for free.) And honestly this has happened again, and again, and again with these companies, getting people hooked and then demanding cash to continue.

    Over the last few years I've moved everything computing away from the major corporations like Microsoft and Google. I host my sites on my own domains, at a company where I can actually phone up a real person if problems arise. I own my domain names. I control my own e-mail. I use Linux on my computer, and FOSS for everything possible. No big ugly surprises, and no sudden bills arriving without warning.

    I mean honestly I am quite prepared to pay for services where needed, and sometimes just because it feels like the right thing to do. I understand that when you pay you can expect a better level of service and support. The problem is that companies like Google and Microsoft don't offer any real support to average customers. They'll take your money and run, but that's it.

    Postscript #1: I would happily pay Twitter if it would eliminate the idiotic ads and "Promoted" tweets, but they won't sell me that option.

    Postscript #2: In a rush situation made the mistake of setting up a quick web site at Wix.com. Which apparently can't even be exported to escape them! A great reminder why I should stick to my own rules about staying far away from commercial operators!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Wow! Didn' t see that coming!

      Yeah, I feel like the "Googly-ness" of the Gsuite is second only to the "Appley-ness" in terms of rage at terrible design choices and brokenness.

      I work at an 85% Apple shop, and we use Gmail. FML. There is no escape for me.

      As for the economics of paid support, it's not horrible if you have a single mailbox for a vanity domain, but if you are a SMB, you could buy a pretty beefy box for the money they are asking for. And you will still wind up paying for office licenses for a decent chunk of your users, and probably Adobe too, as PDF will never die, and people insist on wanting to EDIT THEM after they are exported.

      This is why I leave IT about every 10 years and go back to engineering. Then I get sick of crunch time and miss talking to people and come back. Maybe it's time to just open up a pizza joint.

  17. Neoc

    "option"? what "option"?

    I used the service for the household's personal email accounts. I wasn't given an option to switch to this mythical free option. Anyone know how I need to talk to?

    1. rlightbody

      Re: "option"? what "option"?

      I Googled it for you...

      https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217?hl=en

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