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Comment by corndoge | Hacker News Reader

If you have a normal google account, once you sign up for workspace, if you decide to no longer subscribe, you can't get your original free account functionality back. No more gmail, calendar, keep, etc. Learned the hard way

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Hahaha, makes me feel so much better about my own work when I see this kind of laziness out of the rich-as-hell giants.

Dev: "OK, I finished the user story for migration from a free account to a paid account this sprint, but, again, there's a story for migration from a paid account to a free one and that'll involve compromises X and Y and there are a couple Hard Problems involved since usage may have exceeded free tier limits, and we physically migrate the account in ways that will be hard to undo since we cut corners to get this shipped, which will make it even harder. That's going to be a big chunk of work, and I think we'll need to break it up into smaller stories. Will we be going over that today?"

PM: "Ummmmmmm... yeah..." presses big red button that throws an inconvenient story into the "on ice" bucket that may as well represent "deleted" "Putting that 'on ice', we'll definitely get to it... some day."

Don’t you dare mock my standup style.

And Google Workspace still doesn't play nice with Google Home, Photos, etc. I used to pay for GSuite and switched back to Gmail because of all the services I was ironically locked out of when I paid for them.

That's the funny thing about Google Workspaces, it's really a downgrade when you look out at all the Google services you are cut out of. Google Homes does not work, which is utterly shocking to me. I pay Google for Google Workspace and fancy smoke detectors and WiFi devices and they don't integrate with each other.

Wait really? I thought my regular Google account is disconnected from a Google Workspace account? The email is just used for initial sign up.

I'm really glad I didn't try signing up for it when I was trying to setup my custom domain to host mail.

I signed up using my free account while it was gsuite. Gsuite changed to Workspace, I stopped paying for Workspace and now I can't use my original free services, and I get a blurb explaining this is because I unsubscribed from Workspace.

Possible I'm doing something wrong so I'd love to know what it is, but as far as I can tell, I can't get my free tier back.

(disclosure: googler on workspace here)

This was/is a domain account, right? @yourdomain.com? You upgraded from the free "google apps for your domain" account to a paid workspace account, and now you can't downgrade? If that's the case, that's unfortunately works as intended - that free domain-level tier doesn't exist anymore, so anyone who is on it (myself included) who starts paying and thereby upgrades to one of the current SKUs, can't downgrade to a SKU that no longer is offered.

No, I upgraded from a completely personal account, like your mom might have, to Workspace. I cancelled my Workspace subscription and now have no access to Gmail, calendar, keep, etc. I never used "google apps for your domain".

Starting from an @gmail.com account? We've always required you to have an accompanying domain for workspace accounts, as far as I know.

Reading over your previous post again I guess it was a "google apps for your domain" account. I did use my own domain and it was free, before I upgraded it (and when I upgraded it the product was still called GSuite). I wasnt aware the free tier was called "google apps for your domain". I guess then that the situation you described with the free tier no longer existing is what happened to me.

Good to know at least that I didn't do something wrong. However, there was no warning about this happening in either direction that I recall - no warning that I would not be able to downgrade and no warning upon cancelling my Workplace subscription that I would not go back to my previous free tier. Nothing I could find by some searching that described this either. I appreciate your response here, otherwise I would never have known if I did it wrong...

If you had Gmail on your own domain, then it was the legacy Google Apps Free Tier. You can still create a Google account for free with a non-gmail address, and people can use that email to add you to docs and such, but it doesn't have Gmail. The days when it was called Google Apps was the last time you could get free email hosting on a custom domain.

> You can still create a Google account for free with a non-gmail address

Yeah - my email is elsewhere now, and I was hoping that by cancelling Workspace, my account would convert into the type of account you get when you sign up for Google services with a non Google email. But it didn't.

There was a significant period of time (~6 years) where one could upgrade to a free trial and downgrade again to the grandfathered free tier.

That feature was unfortunately removed some time in 2018.

Can't OP move to Cloud Identity Free to keep access to most of the free services[1]? They wouldn't have access to Workspace-specific services like Gmail and Google Calendar, but they would still have access to Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Keep, and Meet. I assume other non-Workspace services like Google Play will also stay available.

1. https://support.google.com/cloudidentity/answer/7319251

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