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Comment by wombat-man | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised so many of you are upset by this. I use a paid email for the custom domain (not gmail) but I feel like they're requesting a pretty reasonable fee after such a long time of free usage.

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I think the issue is that so many of us were brought in on something pretty simple, "GMail for Domains", that has become so much more than we ever asked for. And in return we've gotten a lesser product (the Google accounts are handicapped in many ways) and a painful migration experience to leave (see inability to take Google Play purchases as one example). It's a terrible bait and switch now that they have years of history to amplify the pain of leaving.

You're right the fee is not unreasonable for the services offered, especially compared to the competition. But given it's not really what many were actually after (we just wanted a @example.com gmail account!) and are left with a handicapped account, why would we want to pay up?

I think the big outrage is directed at losing all the apps, movies, books, etc... that you purchased from Google using that account. It feels like they should provide some way of transferring those purchases to another account.

yeah that makes sense actually.

I'll give you my perspective. I migrated away from GMail years ago for my domain. MX records point to the other host. I have all their core services turned off except Maps and Drive (I don't host anything). I only keep the account because I have 9+ years of play store purchases attached. At the least they need to provide a way to move purchases from a legacy account to a regular account in this process.

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