Hacker News Reader

Comment by darkwizard42 | Hacker News Reader

This feels a little dramatic, no?

You had an absolutely free service built on top of ad revenue. Now that free service has to pay for itself (due to investor or executive pressure). They are charging what is arguably around the same price point as alternatives with high feature parity.

Google isn't "killing" anything, they are just asking users to start paying for it. Perhaps that loses them some users, but they are clearly after something else here (revenue, maybe they have data on how paid users behave differently, perhaps spam/bad actors are a concern on the free plan, idk)

View on HN

Sorry, but no. Google clearly advertised this as 'free forever'. This is on them.

I don't think it's dramatic. There are a couple points to consider:

First, yes, what they've been offering us has value, however, regular Google accounts are free. So asking us to pay $72 per year per user over the standard $0 just for a vanity domain is a little steep. Especially when many of these installs aren't businesses, they're just family domains.

Worse, the bait and switch here is unreasonable. There's no documentation or tooling for migrating from the legacy accounts to vanilla Google accounts. Suppose I don't want to pay $864/year for my family domain. What am I supposed to do with the gigabytes of emails, google docs, photos, app purchases, etc?

Is the choice here really either A) pay up, or B) all your shit goes in the digital dumpster? That's a rotten fucking way to treat somebody that's been advising people to use Google services for over a decade...

If you bind users by offering free without a clear time window ("30 day trial") you should simply not be allowed to shut the service off unless you go out of business. You front loaded your market position on a certain premise. Pay up.

Switching service is neither easy nor free for most users. I wouldn't mind a world where businesses limit free to much longer time frames (say, 5 years) but make it blatantly obvious at sign up. The user can then make an informed choice on whether they are okay with your offer or not.

This would be entirely acceptable if Google Accounts and Workspace weren't inseparably linked. I've got 15 years of purchases made using my Google account - now I'm forced to pay monthly if I want to retain the things I've already paid for.

Except that the closest alternative to a G Suite legacy edition is a free Google account at $0/month. And if you fork over $6/month for the cheapest Business Starter, you're actually getting a worse service than the people who buy additional space for their free Google account - they'll get 100 GB for $20/year while the $72/year G Suite gets you 30 GB. The only benefit for the G Suite is the custom domain, everything else is just downsides.

Respectfully, I was in the 2006 Beta Test for "Gmail on <your domain>", and it's simply not appropriate to refer to these legacy accounts as "free services".

The program was designed to get family mail admins to bring users to gmail en mass. See this: https://imgur.com/a/wQdMCIz

Good point. I think I go that far back too or there about.

I don't think it's the money that bothers me. I just don't trust what I commit to in Google land will be around in five year's time....and I also didn't 'buy' into workspace, just email with custom domain.

It all feels a bit like being part of someone else's experiment :-)

> Google isn't "killing" anything, they are just asking users to start paying for it. Perhaps that loses them some users, but they are clearly after something else here (revenue, maybe they have data on how paid users behave differently, perhaps spam/bad actors are a concern on the free plan, idk)

For many of these users, Google is asking them to pay for... not really anything in return. Maybe they only used the custom email domain, maybe not even that. Maybe they're just asking them to pay for the continued ability to pay for other services like Android apps, YouTube Premium, extended drive storage etc, and continued access to things like Docs/Hangouts that other users will continue to have for free.

>Google isn't "killing" anything, they are just asking users to start paying for it. Perhaps that loses them some users, but they are clearly after something else here (revenue, maybe they have data on how paid users behave differently, perhaps spam/bad actors are a concern on the free plan, idk)

The fact that google/alphabet is a ad company meaning, all their service is target at mining your data email and everything!!! Nothing on google ought to be charged in this case, in fact they really ought to be paying us for using their service, because they are making money from our data.

Your premise is incorrect. Workspace shows no ads, and the privacy policy is extremely clear on the data in Workspace not being used for any kind of ad targeting.

Still serving ads, though, no?

As far as I know, Google Workspace (formerly GSuite) doesn't serve ads[0].

0. https://workspace.google.com/learn-more/security/security-wh...

Workspace is ad-free.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com