And now they're going to start charging me $70 per family member or delete all of their purchases for the last decade or so.
To say I'm aghast is putting it mildly.
The only difference over the free Google Workspaces is the domain name.
Eg, Google One provides 100GB of storage (shareable with your family Google accounts) for £16/year. Just let those who want that to link it to custom domains — Apple (iCloud+) and MS (MS 365) already offer this.
This is what I'd imagine most of the people on Legacy Google Workspaces want.
Google are going to lose even more goodwill without a migration path.
As you can imagine, my username @gmail.com gets too much spam to be usable.
My interpretation is that you'll still be able to use your account on Youtube, Play Store, etc. You'll just lose the workspace specific features like Drive, so use the tools that let you dump that data.
This could be a reasonably low friction way to keep the system working without breaking the "email address is unchangeable per-account" assumption - the underlying Google account can continue to exist, even if the associated MX record disappears, or Google Workspace ceases to provide service.
This is how Google accounts work today if you ignore the "default" sign-up path, and take the route where you create a Google account under an existing external email address.
That "May" still worries me, but hopefully it will still work fine.
I need to find a nice alternative for email with my domain that's going to work for us and not cost me a fortune.
I'm not even massively concerned about Play Store purchases, I barely use any paid apps anymore anyway I can buy them again if I have to.
Since the domain was also bought through GSuite, how do I get that out?
* - while the current Terms of Service last
But, after auditing a number of their enterprise products, dealing with their security team and seeing the quality of the code they produce I have to say they are a very significant security risk.
I'd trust them not to pull the rug any further even less than Google.
When you cancel workspace, the accounts remain active but lose access to just the workspace features (gmail, drive, docs, calendar etc). The accounts will remain the same for things like google play, youtube etc and you won't lose access to any purchases.
The biggest impact I can see, other than the headache of migration, is that former GFYD email address can NEVER be used for docs, drive etc, even on the same terms as a free personal account.
G-Suite Legacy gets converted to Workspace.
Once you stop paying for Workspace, you lose functionality (GMail, Drive etc.).
Nothing stops you from *still* using that account for purchases and moving your e-mail somewhere else.
You don't have to lose access to anything except the core products - gmail, drive, docs, calendar. You still get to log on with your Google Account to access your purchases.
https://support.google.com/cloudidentity/answer/7319251?hl=e...
For a new domain I had to signup to Cloud Identity Premium then cancel. For an existing domain on Google Apps, just remove Workspace and add Cloud Identity Free.
$6 * 12 = $72
Fortunately I already went through the hassle of extracting my photos a while back. It was something like 45 downloads of 2GB zip files, with really chaotic organization of photos.
But I tried to do Google Takeout of just a few things, including Email (which is under 2GB usage) but not including photos. Somehow it still created 63 files, each 2GB in size. I just threw up my hands and gave up. I got my email using IMAP + Thunderbird, and I exported my contacts. The rest is going in the bin.