I am stuck in the same boat as many others who created it for the family 10+ years ago and now am going through how to move each service (GMail, Drive, Keep, Photos, YouTube etc etc) to a plain Gmail account. I have most of it worked out, but it is going to take a lot of time getting 5 people migrated.
Sigh.
It seems like Google really ought to consider adding a family plan SKU to Google Workspace, disabling all the business features, and charging $75/year for a whole domain.
Instead, the current path is going to piss off thousands of their most loyal power users as they force these graybeards to manually help migrate all their family members from the Legacy GSuite plans to vanilla Google accounts. Or worse, it's going to piss off all the family members that end up losing access to every email, photo, app, and doc they've acquired over the past decade on their now defunct legacy account.
Christ, does nobody at Google give a shit about goodwill?
I am holding out a tiny hope that maybe if there is enough negative PR, Google will create a cheaper plan or perhaps provide an off ramp for people that want to switch/migrate to consumer accounts.
Sadly there are too many things I have tied to Google that I am not sure if I can make that switch to Microsoft. But it is getting more and more tempting.
One tactic I am contemplating is using the Cloudflare Email Forwarder (https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/email-forwarding) - this way I can keep all the custom domain email addresses and groups/mailing-lists and redirect them to the new personal gmail accounts. Only problem is that email replies will originate from the new personal addresses.
You can configure a regular gmail account to send from the custom domain. Visit:
Settings -> Accounts and Import -> Send mail as
You'll have to confirm ownership of the alternate email address, but it works fine. Even if the alternate email address is associated with a Gsuite domain.
You need to setup an "App password" on your Google account. Then, when you create an alias, you enter smtp.gmail.com and your app password credential as the smtp server.
Here: https://support.google.com/domains/answer/9437157?hl=en
My web host for my website gives me “free” SMTP services with my hosting so I did initially setup smtp for sending and receiving though gmail, but I ran into a problem where the web host’s smtp servers were often flagged as spam for outbound email, so that sucked. I could get email, but felt like I had to reply using my gmail address to guarantee delivery.
However, I had previously setup outbound email using AWS SES (Simple Email Service) for a different website that sends out transactional emails and had an idea. I setup AWS SES to send out my personal domain emails from gmail and now delivery is great. I rarely have emails flagged as spam. Unfortunately, AWS SES is outbound only, so you cannot use it for both inbound and outbound. I get inbound email to gmail by having it setup to check the web host’s smtp (but you could use forwarding like you mention), and I send outbound email through AWS SES with great delivery results, all through the gmail web client.
Now, this is not a route I would casually recommend. It is arguably a pain in the a* to setup AWS SES. But since this audience here on Hackernews is more of a geek/DIY crowd I thought I would mention it. You can setup AWS SES to send out emails from a personal account for pennies a month. You could arguably setup a Free tier AWS account and never go over the free limits. If you are willing to do some upfront work, it can be dirt cheap to do, and you get to learn the intricacies of email setup like SPF, DMARC, and DKIM.
Protonmail[0], for example, has Mail, Calendar, and a Drive service. Pricing is on the high side, unfortunately.
Migadu[1] has Mail and Calendar, and pricing is particularly attractive.
The next higher plan would already have me pay almost five times as much and apart from the higher limits just enables business features that are unnecessary for families.
I've only personally hit the limit once in the last two years, but I have a hard time believing that e.g.: 100 emails a day would impact their bottom line. I'm kinda tempted to just use Sendgrid's free tier for SMTP which is 100/d.
I can't see this being less than a 60 hour project for me to deal with in total, so the main thing I'm upset about is what I perceive to be a short amount of time to deal with.
So far my best bet looks like signing up as a Fastmail reseller so that users can be directly billed by Fastmail. My preference would be to stay with Google because of all the issues I think I might run into by migrating off of it (mostly related to using it for authentication for other services, which is a practice I no longer do, but did for some time).
If Google would allow each user to pay separately for what they need, then that would be an easy decision for me, because I want to stay, but I don't want to pitch 146 other Wikman's to pay me to pay Google.
Has anyone else managed to solve that problem?