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Comment by vedtopkar | Hacker News Reader

Curious as to why no one is recommending just paying for Google Workspace? $6/month for Google vs $5/month for Fastmail seems similar enough to avoid the hassle of transferring email servers.

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I'm paying for Workspace and use it as my primary Google Account and really wouldn't recommend it unless you also have another regular Google account and use Workspace only for work, because the "Google experience" on a Google workspace account is really sub-par. Google assistant functionality is limited, you can't get invited to someone's home, you can't set up a family, actually you can't use Google One at all. The list of inconveniences is huge. I've been planning to move out of Google Workspace for years but it's a hassle to migrate primary inbox.

+1 to this.

Adding on: I also can't use Google Pay on my G Suite Legacy account, we can't be invited to families for Google One/YouTube Premium either, and apparently my free Google Voice number might stop working if I fail to transfer it to a free @gmail.com account before they force me to downgrade.

I’ve been doing the same, primarily for the unlimited storage, which I have long used as an offsite backup. But just this month they have taken that away. It’s just another thing in a very long list that they kill with little warning. So add that to the growing list of reasons not to use GSuite.

One reason I am looking to move away is that Google simply has too large of a market stake in the email business. If I'm going to pay, I'd rather pay a smaller company in order to stimulate diversity in the field; it's just better for open standards.

I've looked at moving away from the google's data slurping for a while, but when including things like gvoice features, it integrates nicely for my custom domain fully. If you use voice through a browser, the web version is falling apart though. Seems like voice might die soon, one less reason to hang around if so.

What super annoys me is I use GSuite for personal use, but Google seems to think only businesses would actually pay. So much so they restrict things like my ability to leave reviews on either maps or play stores. I simply can't review anything, it doesn't even give me the option with a gsuite-based account. I was told because it's a "business" service, but certain some of us obviously do use this for personal as well for my personal domain alone and not using my employer to slander products in reviews.

Even more odd, I can't review maps locations from my pc, but I can my phone. Play store simply gives me to review option what so ever on both. My tickets and complaints went nowhere with them.

Caveat emptor for using GSuite.

Because most people hate lock-in from surveillance capitalism companies but that choice was made before most understood the bait and switch and changing email providers is a pain. We took a seemingly-free deal we took a decade ago as our data was used to sell manipulation-as-a-service to the highest bidder.

Now weaponizing our data against us for profit is not enough money and they want to keep doing that and bill us monthly too? This finally gives the added motivation to put in the effort to leave a company that already lost our trust years ago.

Agreed. I guess quite a lot of people were already considering moving but since Google in own domain worked fine and was free it was not enough to spend time moving.

Yeah, very much the case for me. "Well is Fastmail any better?" "Oh Protonmail doesn't support IMAP or custom domains" "Ehh, maybe I'll check something later"

Well now Google have given me an ultimatum. And honestly the same service from Google is worth less than from a competitor because of the risks of being banned from ML and the level of risk from having so much stuff being bundled. So when being a Google product is a negative to the value proposition, yet Google are charging more, time to move.

For me the annoyance was that I had 4 legacy organizations that I had to spend hours figuring out how to merge (incredibly non trivial to get drive contents from one organization to another, shared drives work but only with files and not folders, so I had to move stuff over a folder at a time). If they’re going to do this crap, I wish they had proper migration tools. They left a lot of us high and dry. A lot of people aren’t against spending money, but if we already have to spend the time to move crap around, we might as well pay an organization we trust.

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