New Pricing for G Suite Basic and Business Editions

Why is "New Pricing" always higher? Not a real question, but it lowers my confidence in Google to see them pull stupid marketing tricks like this.

I'm also a little surprised they're raising prices. I figured this monthly revenue was practically nothing on their bottom line, and that they would prefer to keep users on their platform for network effect reasons.

Their chat product also kinda sucks. Ever tried searching your hangouts for a nugget of information? Generally when I think I've typed something in hangouts, I do a search, find absolutely nothing relevant (despite knowing it's in there somewhere), give up, and just check another source.

I am a long-time user of GSuite/ Google Apps for Work and have a custom domain with accounts for my family members. I updated my free tier account from 2009 to a paid subscription in 2014, which I must say now, was a big mistake. The biggest drawback I see currently is that some features will never come to GSuite, like family subscriptions for Google Play Music and sharing of purchased apps and movies. Every purchase made with my GSuite account will be gone, if I choose to cancel my subscription and decide to go somewhere else. This is what really bothers me currently and prevents me from switching to another service. It would be fair, to have a GSuite-to-Free account functionality somewhere for the Google Play purchases. I would also be happy, if they would keep a cheaper GSuite subscription for families with less features but all the family sharing options.

Beside that, I am not completely sure, if it is legal to have purchases/ paid digital goods linked to a monthly/annually paid account.

As an aside, google breaks things for the free users of gsuite (academic or grandfathered accounts) and shows no intent to fix it. While its understandable that they don't provide a high level of support, breaking things and not fixing them doesn't give me confidence to ever want to pay for the higher tier products.

example: gmail's "default routing" is mostly ignored with the proviso that it knows that the rules exist so if one creates a user that corresponds to an email already in the default routing section, it complains.

We have to ask the question...why do these vendors keep increasing prices? Shouldn’t the economies of scale reduce prices instead? AWS has the right attitude to keep reducing prices. We need this attitude in software.

Its either greed or market pressure to keep showing increasing profits/growth.

PS: I am with Zoho. We recently reduced prices. https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html

I have a couple small businesses on it for nothing other than convenience. I clicked this hoping for a pleasant surprise but instead got an expected reality. No problem, email migration is one of the easiest out there (as long as you aren’t to tangled in their other services) and I find myself using clients more than their web interface anymore so much of the gmail advantage is non-existent.

This could backfire. While $2/mo is no big deal, a lot of smaller customers don't actually need the "Business" flavor so they could downgrade to "Basic". Or they could consider moving to Microsoft: $12 per user is substantially more than Office 365 Business (which costs $10 per user per month, or just $8.25/user/mo with 1 year commitment).

Wait. So am I getting this right? They scrapped Hangouts, in favour of 2 seperate apps, Hangout Meet and Hangout Chat, and they are using that as a reason to raise their prices?

Cloud Search seems interesting. But the email auto-completion isn't full enough, especially in a business environment to even bother using. None of this is worth a 20% increase in prices...

I have heard stories of one bad employee account locked by Google make the whole domain being locked. It take days to contact unlock...

Literally just a 20% price hike.

Why bother with all the fluff, just say, "We're charging you 20% more now."

Honestly, for what they are offering it’s still pretty cheap, if you include Gmail, G-Suite and Meet. I’d love them to have a proper chat app though.

There is a lot of young startups offering just a single product for a higher monthly price. Still, I was thinking that Google cares more about the adoption of its cloud office package and probably doesn’t get a lot of its revenue from it.

Literally the only reason I pay for GSuite is to be able to use Gmail with my custom domains. I imagine a lot of their Basic membership subscribers are similar. This might be a deal-breaker for me because I was already debating on if it was worth the $5/mo.

Are there any other solid alternatives that the HN crowd can recommend?

I wonder their reason behind the price increase,

Inflation as in developers salary is forever increasing.

Or they charge more just because they can.

I used Hangouts today and it was really bad.

Had much better experience with AWS Chime and Zoom.

TLDR: We are increasing prices 20%.