Ask HN: How long until Google charges for private Gmail accounts? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How long until Google charges for private Gmail accounts?

176 pointsjusonchan81196 comments

Given the recent changes to workspace, it seems inevitable that someone at Google start to think this might be a huge revenue generator

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My guess is that killing (edit: free) workspace was more about reducing maintenance and technical debt costs for users rather than raising revenue.

Google is also unlikely to kill Gmail because Gmail is the incentive for users to be signed into a Google Account, which allows them to target ads to you. That's a critical anchor.

Your inbox is worth much more than your money, if they can take both they will. They are already charging for additional storage, so I expect it will just continue on that path.

Agreed, I think they'll just never increase the free storage again. Eventually, people will get tired of quarterly inbox cleanups and just pay for the extra storage, which is a win-win for them and avoids a serious PR crisis.

I’m surprised there aren’t some great tools out there that help with this. Seems like a niche to fill as it’s inevitable that peoples free storage hits limits over time.

I know of two.

https://mailstrom.co/

https://clean.email/

Mailstrom seems to be about unsubscribing, as somewhat does clean.email (ironically I find their home page to be the opposite of clean). I'm talking about finding the random 40 meg videos my dad sent me that should have been a YouTube link. Ideally such a tool WOULD find the YouTube link, and edit the email to include that.

You could search gmail emails by operator like larger_than:10mb or such.

You absolutely could as an initial step in a poor man's solution. However, I wouldn't call this a great UX. It means that all the ones I want to keep will continue to appear every time I need to cleanup. That doesn't group by sender, nor does it sorting out YouTube-like forwards from my dad's friends from the actual content my dad has sent.

I could go on and on for what I'd consider a great cleanup experience. It's surprising to me that such a thing doesn't exist, nor is it the kind of thing that's built into Gmail itself. You'd figure they would be best to offer a simple cleanup experience that has sane defaults.

What about Ctrl + A, Del? I'm only half-joking. How many emails older than 3 months in a mailbox growing beyond GBs are really worth saving? I don't want to sound harsh - that's just how my mailbox looks like.

You're throwing away all your history in doing so. Personally I never want to delete emails from loved ones, which is where most of the storage ends up going anyway.

Is your mail box filled by lovely emails rather than newsletters/ads, really? Text emails could take small amount of volume. Maybe many photos are attached?

Newsletters & ads typically link externally to images rather than embed. I would guesstimate less than 10-20% of my storage (not total number of emails) is newsletters.

I agree that genuine exchanges with the people in your life should be kept. As well as anything about purchases, invoices, salary notes etc. But my point is that these days newsletters, spam, notifications, ads, etc. make up a huge part of many people's email traffic.

If you are in the habit of exchanging a large amount of documents and pictures over email, a dedicated storage solution might be more appropriate.

Work-related communication, as in freelancing, might deserve a separate mailbox that is kept clean of unimportant things.

You’d be surprised. A few days ago it was useful to look back at emails I’d received over a decade ago to work out when and how well some specialist book I’d books had sold.

I look for a 10-year old email every one or two months. The 15-year old ones practically don't ever cross the line.

Iunno, my inbox gets increasingly useless every year. Facebook emails me about a message but stopped including the message in the email.

Online sellers email me that order #2748747284933938 has had its status updated. Click link and yippee, it’s gone from order received to processing. That’s the email. Thanks.

It’s really annoying and turns me off using those products.

That's what filters and labels and "skip the inbox" are there for.

I like the emails of what I bought, I just have no idea what items were inside #2748747284933938. Sometimes I have multiple orders on the go and telling apart #2748747284933938 from #111111111 or from order #22222222222222 is impossible.

Order status update might not be valuable, but the knowledge that you purchased product X is. That's a biggie for targeted ads.

If only they'd use that targeting more efficiently as in "don't send ads to some that has recently purchased".

Yeah, Google seems to think that if I buy a washing machine, I am on some kind of washing machine buying spree.

If a user who hasn't bought a washing machine recently is 0.1% likely to be interested in a washing machine ad, and one who has is 0.2% likely to be interested, then they may be making the right call, even if for most people that second number is 0.0%. A few outliers can really skew those kinds of things.

Yeah, it might be a strange statistical artifact. Perhaps someone is buying washing machines for an entire dormitory and isn't satisfied with the first test model. Such people, while rare, might be valuable enough to push new washing machine ads on everyone.

That, people with multiple laundry rooms (somewhat-large McMansions with two or more floors may have these) who buy one to see if they like it, then buy another (same or a different one), people with enough money to buy washing machines for someone else (or "this one's OK but I'm open to buying another if it looks better, and giving this nearly-new one to my kid/parent/friend" or whatever), et c. With those kinds of low-frequency purchases it doesn't take a lot to make one category of buyer twice as likely to buy a second time as the population at large is to buy one in the first place—even if the notion seems silly to most people seeing the ads.

> Online sellers email me that order #2748747284933938 has had its status updated. Click link and yippee, it’s gone from order received to processing. That’s the email. Thanks

I mean, I click < 1% of these kind of email links but I'm glad I get them on the off chance I do.

The point is the vendor has stopped putting it in the email because they don’t want google to know what I bought or what I paid, but it also makes it really annoying for the user.

For some things, I’ve taken to copying the page of my purchase and replying to myself in the inevitable “thanks for your order” (and zero details of it in the email).

God help you if you have multiple people (spouse, kids) using your Amazon or whatever account.

It's not so much that they don't want google to know what you bought or paid: it's that they want you back on their website so that they can track you / encourage additional purchases.

I'm pretty sure they do that because it's better to send you 1 email with a link to the current state of the item rather than 5 emails with hardcoded and soon to be outdated information.

Why not both? Data on website is owned by operator so it can be edited or deleted. I want to have data also in my mailbox.

At some point I gave up trying to organize my Gmail when I realized that 99% of my use of it is just opening it to get a sign-in code or check on a package or whatever. I send an email to an actual human with it maybe once a year. I don't check it unless I'm expecting something because there's almost zero chance something I care about will show up there when I'm not expecting it.

My personal email is almost entirely read-only, and nearly all its utility is letting computers, not people, send me messages that I'm expecting.

They aren't killing Workspace, they're just making users upgrade to a paid plan. It's the same product.

Not exactly. The plans are different with different product mix. At least I remember it like that.

They could have just removed the difference if it was costing them so much. Very few features were different from the lowest workspace plan as far as I remember.

So far as I could tell the remaining "difference" was price, and they probably thought it easier to raise the price on the grandfathered accounts than lower the price of the lowest tier. (Obviously, it's never easy to raise prices.)

If the only remaining difference was price I don't think it would cost much at all to maintain.

IIRC a couple of things were limited. I ran into a few.

- Reduced Google Voice/Meet Calling options. - No TLS rules for mail.

> If the only remaining difference was price I don't think it would cost much at all to maintain.

You are thinking about marginal costs. Even if there is no marginal cost for a "free" priced tier, that doesn't mean the operating costs of the tier go away and that the tier isn't likely losing money. We don't have transparent data on how much in terms of operating costs Google was eating for these grandfathered in free accounts, but it doesn't take a lot to imagine there were some operating costs that Google was possibly eating for some time now. I would imagine they ran they ran some sort of analysis on the pros/cons of goodwill/marketing versus operating costs and a price raise made sense.

Not only that, they actually killed free workspace years ago, they just grandfathered in legacy users. That's what they're ending.

I am not sure if google will end up terminating free personal gmail eventually or not. But I don't take terminating the free workspaces some years ago, or terminating the grandfathered-in legacy leftover free workspaces more recently--as any kind of a signal for it.

Gmail is all "you are the product" free though.

They're getting all that data from your e-mail and can chew it up and sell it back to other businesses (apparently they don't use it to target ads at you any more, but you can be certain they're still harvesting data).

I'm fairly sure collecting all that data is core to their business model and they'd never make it paid.

Same product but with reduced functionality. For example, email routing isn't available (with the exception of the catch-all functionality).

The free versions of Google Workspace apps (Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs) are also there to build demand for the corporate version. Or worst case, if building demand fails, they at least create familiarity -- so that there's more employee acceptance to potentially switching from MS Office to Google Workspace.

Not sure I agree on this. Those free versions existed before they had a business/paid offering.

Google could at a future date make these a paid offering to boost earnings. There is no guarantee googles consumer services remain free long term

They discontinued offering the free version to new customers in 2012. I would expect they had already done the analysis on the marketing value and found it negligible.

I meant the @gmail.com versions of those apps.

To a first approximation there is no market for paid consumer email. Google, Microsoft, Apple, None of them offer it.

They may offer expanded storage, but that's shared with other products and a different motivation. They may offer paid email as well, but that's always got a business focus, at least for SMEs.

Yes, companies like Fastmail, Hey, and many small email providers will offer paid personal email accounts, but even these put an emphasis on business use, and they are many orders of magnitude smaller than the big email providers.

Gmail will remain free as long as email is expected to be free by users. Gmail is the ad-supported free product, and Google Workspace is the no-advertising, business focused version that you can pay for.

(Disclaimer, I'm a Googler but have no inside information on this, these are my opinions)

>Gmail will remain free as long as email is expected to be free by users.

This was also the expectation of G suite users. Forcing non-business users onto a paid business product which didn't even exist when users signed up was not the expectation. The original question should be looked at from that perspective. How long until Google creates a business focused Gmail plan and forces any user who uses their Gmail for business onto that plan. That could be done with a simple change in terms of service as well.

I would expect there to be more pushback and revolting if Google suddenly said you can't use the free Gmail product for business. I can't even guess the number of contractors, artists, coffee shops, Etsy stores, food trucks, etc that I've personally interacted with that are using Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL email accounts for their business.

I also couldn't imagine this happening, just think it is a better way to frame to conversation and understand how G suite users are feeling right now. There is a counterpoint though based on what you said, the large number of business users also means a larger business opportunity for them. The G suite to workspace transition has been 10 years in the making, you could imagine spreading the outrage over a longer period of time and many users not even noticing it is happening.

Microsoft does actually have M365 Personal which is mainly about the Office apps but also removes advertising on the webmail. The big difference from the business plans is that you don't get the admin center or the things inside of it like the exchange control panel.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/outlook/outloo...

Apple offers paid consumer email (with custom domains) as part of their iCloud+ subscription offering. I migrated my personal email to it from GSuite at the end of 2021.

Apple's business model is fleecing customers in exchange for brand recognition and privacy marketing.

But they just throw that in if you upgrade, right? You don't actually pay for the extra email? It is just another thing to make your subscription more sticky.

iCloud+ custom domains has one nasty gotcha at the moment - you can't have a catchall address, which you could with Google.

> Ask HN: How long until Google charges for private Gmail accounts?

They...already do. It's called Google One, further being pushed by the progressive narrowing of what doesn't count against the 15GB free storage limits.

I do wonder when people will cease to be willing to pay the "tax" on storage upgrades when it comes to "first party" cloud.

With the general push (at least in Europe) among regulators to decouple (see investigations around app stores, bundled default apps, payment services on stores), I wonder if this model will fall apart some day. The "free" iCloud and Google storage tiers seem to have stagnated, whereas the cost of storage falls.

While you can't do everything supported by first-party iCloud storage (specifically iCloud backups for one example), the files app and support for storage by API ought to provide some competition for these overpriced first party storage options. If regulators force unbundling, we could see a separate ecosystem of storage from apps/services.

Maybe this would help drive more transparency of the true costs of the products and services in question, by decoupling them from "pay us 20x market rate for more storage, since you can't use any other storage with our app".

iCloud and Google storage plans are overpriced? I have always thought they are cheap storage plans. 50GB of iCloud costs $0.99 per month. 2TB costs $10 which is similar to other solutions such as Dropbox or OneDrive.

That's $5 per TB. In Hetzner I can rent a 5TB storage box for $11.32, that's $2.27 per TB.

But that Hetzner storage box isn't redundant, doesn't do revisions, automatic sync and backups, etc. without some time spent on it.

Yet someone could provide all of that for _everyone_ for literal 0-cost, and probably an actual ISP would provide at least some written guarantees on the redundancy of your data.

The business model of all these companies is to tie their software to their expensive storage.

But it's not 0 cost. You need storage redundancy, backups, software updates. Those things cost time.

Yes, it does. It has automatic snapshots, up to ten. Google doesn't have that, if I delete a file from the trash is gone forever.

I pay a buck something for 50 GB of iCloud. Is there really someone selling 50GB for less than that?

iCloud pricing is designed to inflict the most amount of pain. The free tier is useless because it will not even backup a single iPhone, not even the cheapest offers. The 50GB tier is useless because it will not even backup a single _full_ iPhone, much less one of the higher capacity ones, and even if you avoid backing up (which kind of defeats the purpose of iCloud in the first place), 50GB is still a ridiculous amount.

And so you are forced to move to the next iCloud tier ... which is expensive as hell compared to others.

iOS and apps (that don't consume your iCloud capacity) would use about 10-20GiB on 64GB(actually 59.6GiB) iPhone, so it can be backed up.

I pay for Google One but don't even use gmail

I can't find the exact verbiage or screenshots, but my recollection is that Gmail used to be billed as effectively infinite storage, with the limit going up over time. However, that limit has been frozen at 15GB for some time.

I am now exactly the kind of customer you describe, paying for a 200GB Google One plan in large part so I don't have to fiddle with old email to stay under the limit. The price is reasonable, and hopefully as a paying customer I'm less likely to find my products on killedbygoogle.com.

And you get actual support from Google with Google One!

I think you're right. The limit has been frozen at 15GB for some time, and even if you just use gmail at some point you are going to hit that, at which point I imagine many will upgrade to avoid having to delete potentially valuable emails.

I think most people now look at email as a total archive of all their communications through mail - not a 'mailbox' they prune and delete every so often.

This won't happen. A Gmail account is the gateway for Android (most people using or getting started with Android would assume that a Gmail account is necessary to set it up). As long as Google doesn't give up on Android, YouTube and Maps, the free Gmail accounts aren't going anywhere. There's no point letting some other provider capture usage or other information (through email notifications) from these platforms.

What could happen is that the space for each mailbox may be restricted, and linked accounts may be considered for the total space used by a person. Unused accounts may also be pruned quicker with hardly any notice.

> A Gmail account is the gateway for Android

It's also an "in" on iOS, alongside Maps.

I would be amazed if they stopped offering regular Gmail for free because it hooks users into the Google platform and encourages them to create an account. What I can see though is they might start charging for services that currently come with Gmail e.g. you might find they start charging for Google Drive and Google Docs etc. Some manager will come along as say "Hey Microsoft charges for this stuff so why can't we?"

Perhaps they start adding quality of life micro-transactions?

Some of which provide enough value that a significant portion of the user-base ends up paying for something?

A Gmail account and my pixel3a are my last Google products. When the pixel does I am unlikely to replace it with another, and will then start looking into just how many accounts I need to shift the backup email away from Gmail.

Aren't they already? At the top of my inbox is a message informing me that I'm almost out of space. My infinitely expanding mailbox limit from Google has stopped expanding. A good things come to an end.

Would be nice if you got some premium support for buying extra storage

You do

one.google.com

Don't you? I seem to remember them advertising human support when they first started calling it "Google One," but I never tried it.

What I find interesting is that I spent a good few evening clearing out the junk from my gmail account. I got it down to around 80% and within a few weeks I'm back to 95% again...

I'm pretty much awful at maintaining my inbox. I don't know how people do it. There's just so much junk and I get like 1 important email for every 5000 unimportant ones.

I guess that's what filters are for but I'm pretty lazy in that regard too.

No one weird trick, just the obvious. Don't sign up for too much, strictly limit your inbox to one page, delete or handle+archive as necessary to achieve that. I've been using Gmail since 2004 and am currently using 0.54 GB of my 15 GB quota; I've never regretted deleting anything later.

When you say "so much junk", are you talking about spam that Gmail isn't catching? Or just legitimate mail you don't find very interesting?

Just delete everything over 90 days old.

Take a day to religiously unsubscribe from trash. it's likely that over the years you've signed up for many news letters (because of shitty dark patterns) that keep spamming you.

All those emails are required by law to include an easy unsubscribe link in the email, usually it's at the very bottom in a small font.

I found that my email has the same problem my real world has: it isn't that hard to keep stuff organized when it is clear where each thing goes.

When it is not clear, or there isn't a good place to put it, stuff starts to pile up.

Once I have figured out where it should go, which is 99.99% of the effort, actually getting it there usually isn't that big a deal. You can organize 500 emails in an hour if you have set the systems and the shortcuts up - less if you can do it with filters.

Photos backed up from your phone count as part of your Google free storage. I had far more space consumed by trashed photos that had been backed up than by email.

Ah, that's it then! I'll need to put in some time to identify the bad photos and cull them.

'size:5mb has:attachment' is indispensable at helping reduce one's gmail storage size.

https://www.labnol.org/internet/gmail-size-search/26669/

15% of a 15GB limit is 2.25GB.

Could you possibly be getting 2.25GB of email in a few weeks? I mean, email is pretty small, at least unless it has attachments.

I wonder what's going on. It seems unlikely to me it's really 2.25GB of spam email in a few weeks.

You need to unsubscribe from things you have no intention of ever reading and start filtering crap you don't want straight to the trash.

Gmail has a pretty good interface to creating automatic filters to tag,move,or delete crap built in or if you prefer imapfilter lets you basically write a lua program to filter your email.

Gmail's free quota is more being quickly depleted when Google started counting space used by 'high quality' (limited to 2000x2000px) photos. Previously that was free, but not any longer.

Never, aside from the existing space limits. That's like asking how long until Google charges per search. They monetize it effectively and efficiently already and losing those users would devastate that, along with the stickiness of account management/SSO.

Agreed! You as a user are the product, you are not the customer. Google is a marketing company. Charge money, and their supply of product drops like a rock.

Google would only do that if Microsoft and maybe some other big free email providers would do it as well.

It would not be for monetization, but to start to tie addresses to well known identities. A coordinated action from the biggest providers.

Addresses like htfan199100@gmail.com (the Managing Director and Head of Investment Banking of the Emirates Investment Bank in Dubai who sent me an email with my public IP as the email subject) would disappear, since paying 20€/year for such a purpose would likely not be lucrative anymore. They'd move to some other shady domains which could easily be blacklisted.

I would gladly pay for Gmail if it guaranteed that my Google account won't be disabled when some "AI" script considers it suspicious and if Google finally fixes issues with spam coming right from their @gmail.com addresses.

Would you trust a guarantee from Google?

It's guaranteed but if it happens you can't reach anyone and there are no liabilities on Google's part. Guaranteed!

I wouldn't put it past them, but Gmail is quite the loss leader for Google. And unlike other loss leaders like YouTube (let's face it, ads and $9.99 rentals aren't gonna compensate for the countless live streams eating bandwidth), I bet it's relatively cheap for them to run. Once you have Gmail, email still being a personal necessity, then you've got an account for all of Google's services.

However, they've got people trapped. If they began charging, I think the vast majority of people would roll over and pay.

If 2/3 of users stayed and paid $3 a month Google profits would grow 50% next year.

> And unlike other loss leaders like YouTube (let's face it, ads and $9.99 rentals aren't gonna compensate for the countless live streams eating bandwidth)

Do you have a source for this? My understanding is that YouTube is now a big revenue stream for Google and probably started breaking even years ago.

I've always assumed that Gmail gave Google the opportunity to see how people actually type (use words), so they can link topics together and improve their search capabilities. The value of this would exceed the cost of email I would imagine.

Also, if you use iCloud+, then you can attach a domain to your account and use iCloud email. Obviously only good for individual usage, but it's been extremely reliable for me.

I think this is correct. Google products only exist if they can provide personal user data in a way that other products do not.

I'm not following - what would Google be charging for? Didn't they stop scanning email for ads a few years back?

Upkeep, storage, maintenance of a billion users.

I wouldn't put it past them. I'm currently leaving Google (the last jigsaw piece is gmail), but would almost encourage google to charge so that people can snap out of it and find a better alternative.

Any gmail alternative suggestions? (I'm fine with paying if they are a good long term bet).

Fastmail or HEY

I use fastmail.com and it's been a really good experience, to be honest it doesn't have all of the features that you can find on Google Workspaces but I didn't use most of them anyway. They also support multiple custom domains.

My current alternative for Gmail is Fastmail. Seems like a decent cross between features and price. I'd rather pay and be the customer.

I also use Fastmail. I think I've been using it around 5 years and haven't had any issue. They added throwaway email addresses recently which has been helpful.

I use paranoid.email as my personal email. Sure you have to use pgp keys, but if you follow all the steps you’ll be fine. When it’s all said and done paranoid is definitely the most secure email service I’ve used next to I2P Bote.

I believe mailbox.org let's you do the same (upload a private key with which all unencrypted mail will be encrypted). And they let you use it with your own domain.

I think it's a great feature that more hosts should offer. Actual deniability, what's not to love?

Depending on your needs, some of the cheaper alternatives focused on privacy and located in Europe are:

* Posteo.de (no custom domain support)

* Mailbox.org

* Runbox.com

* Mailfence.com

If a service located in the U.S. is not a concern, then mxroute has great options for multiple domains and multiple mailboxes.

Services like Fastmail and Hey become quite expensive if you need more than a couple of mailboxes (not aliases). ProtonMail and Tutanota, though privacy focused, can also get expensive for multiple mailboxes. While ProtonMail has some support for IMAP on paid plans, Tutanota does not support it.

postale.io is also in Europe.

Can you share a bit about the alternatives you've find? especially if you've find an alternative to google photos.

You'll find better answers than I can give based on searching here and searching "Degoogle". I've just rapidly said goodbye out of frustration and am using suboptimal stuff while I work it out.

Re: Google Photos, I actually would have paid Google for extra photo storage as their app is, of course, good. I would have paid out of convenience. But they started demanding I send them my passport and utility bills before I could do that. I understand they likely have their policies and reasons, but can you believe that? I have to send them my passport and data just for the honour of paying them? Straw that broke the camels back.

I already have a Prime account so I just let Amazon scoop up my photos until I find a better alternative. It's actually not bad (has "group by face" and stuff, but not as clean as Google - but maybe I've not delved into it enough). To me, same big tech nonsense, but at least Amazon actually support the customer (support is good vs non-existent at Google) and they let me pay them without requiring my dental records.

/end rant

> But they started demanding I send them my passport and utility bills before I could do that.

They wanted me to send them ID so they'd let me look at an "age restricted video" on youtube. Namely a compilation of every time Samuel L Jackson says "motherfucker" in his first 10 movies or so.

Seriously. I'd rather rewatch pulp fiction.

Moving away from Gmail is an hassle, but it's ultimately eady. What I can't do without is Maps. There's no real alternative (I don't know about Apple Maps, don't own an iPhone), nothing gets even close to Google Maps.

Apple Maps works great, but you have to use Apple.

Edit: Apple works great for navigation. Google is much better for locating things by business name, etc. Google just has far more data.

Apple can't even display the speed you are going.

Google Maps can display the speed, and the speed limit.

I won't install Google Maps, but it annoys me every single time.

OsmAnd is an alternative to Maps.

I don't know what kind of requirement you have that "nothing gets close". My opinion is that Osm is much more useful, but YMMV.

OsmAnd and also Organic Maps are great, I have them installed and use them regularly, specially for non-commercial walks, like parks, etc. But Google Maps has much more information on restaurants, bars, shops, hospitals, post offices, pharmacies, hotels, carshops, etc... And the reviews are also priceless when browsing restaurants. Also navigation wise, knowing speed limits, current traffic (I know, I know, the paradox of data sharing), toll-free roads, searching for exact addresses are much much better on Google Maps. For me, of course!

I'm in exactly the same boat. Currently trying HERE WeGo, it's okay. I think it's going to come down to reminding myself that Google Maps is not always as polished as it appears.

I hope soon; the value in private account things such as this is "a human on the other end to beg, plead, or yell at when things go wrong."

I've done this for nearly 2 decades and it has saved my bacon more than a few times. I think I know what I'm doing with running my own site and services, except when I really really don't.

My go to example is; "My Dad literally deleted all of his email and, to this day I have no clue how it happened." By working with a midranger (Hostdime) who knew what they were doing, I got on chat, and they were like, yup, it's gone. But what we can do is roll your entire deal back a day.

Now, I do IT and am familiar with things -- but I had no clue they had this capability. Yes, it cost me extra, a whopping $15, but so worth it.

I don't think they will, it would be suicide (their business model relies on the fact that they can collect data from you. It's free because you are the product !).

Yet, it's still useful to keep in mind that they can disable your account at any time (with _all_ associated services i.e. your email, contact list, youtube history, Drive documents, etc) without any appeal (e.g. because AI would have triggered supposed misconduct from you or because AI may think you are not the genuine account owner !). Because of that, it's always good practice to periodically backup your data (e.g. using takeout.google.com, noting that the export from GMail is half-broken with non-unicode characters - which is why I backup it with IMAP...).

This is better for Gmail backups. https://github.com/GAM-team/got-your-back

I’d love to pay Google if it meant I could trust they wouldn’t read/index my email and use the information in for any purpose.

Even Fastmail "reads and indexes your email" so you can search it and to train their spam filter: https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy/

> Google Workspace customers own their customer data, not Google. Customer data that Google Workspace organizations put into our systems is theirs, and we do not scan it for advertisements.[1]

if you pay for Google Workspace, your email is not scanned/indexed with the intention to serve you ads based on that content.

[edited for clarity]

[1] https://workspace.google.com/learn-more/security/security-wh...

Not scanned for advertisements. There are plenty of other uses for that data

At its most basic interpretation, they do scan your emails for spam. That's something I'm perfectly happy letting my email provider do for me.

Google Workspace explicitly guarantees your data won't be scanned for advertising purposes. Businesses trust it with their trade secrets and internal communications so I presume Google wouldn't scan it for other reasons too. Starts at $6/user/month.

https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/gws_security_white...

Google only explicitly promises to not scan for advertisements. That almost seems like an admission they scan it for everything else

People at least expect that Google scans for malware and scam attempts.

This is a complaint made fairly regularly, but I mean...yes. spam classification and filters require "scanning" your email.

The workspace data policies are fairly strict though,your data doesn't leave your account and can't be used outside the context of your account.

"These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google. We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads."

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603

I think they used to ad-scan free Gmail accounts, but stopped several years ago because telling paying customers "well see, we do scan some email, but not yours" required too much nuance.

No pb, gogol blocked my software (aka noscript/basic (x)html web browsers) a few years ago (for authentication, account creation, etc), then I now have my own smtp server (a raspberry pi with a 32GB usb key sitting next to my IAP modem, and hopefully, soon a RISC-V mini-computer, to help free the world from ARM toxic PI). I did even write the smtp software myself in lean C89 with benign bits of c99/c11.

Now, they put in the "spam" folder all the emails I send to ppl using their servers... even though many of those ppl removed my emails from the "spam" folder.

Actually this kind of thing, whether intentional or not on Google’s part, does grate on me a little. Assuming you’ve correctly configured your domain’s SPF, DKIM, etc, then failing to deliver your emails properly could potentially be viewed as an abuse of a monopoly. In other words, their actions unfairly punish independent self-hosted SMTP users and thus make it more likely that the market will favour a larger provider, including of course… Gmail.

Indeed I do pay a DNS tax, and I did setup a proper SPF record (not DKIM since it is overkill/unreasonable: if your smtp server is pown, DKIM does not bring anything more than SPF as far as I can recall except complex kludge). That said, SMTP was designed with the possibility to avoid the DNS tax: instead of a domain use [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] for an ipv4 or [IPv6:...] for an ipv6. Where something seems really wrong: ppl removing my emails from their spam folder does not seem to have any impact.

Google won't charge for gmail because it's a treasure trove of our most intimate secrets that are used as grist for it's advertising mill.

Besides, the millisecond they do so I'm switching to someone like protonmail. The only reason I still use gmail today is that it's free and the inertia to move is huge. Google charging for gmail would be like meta charging for facebook. Our data is worth so much more to them than a few bucks a month in a service charge.

Imagine what an incredible intelligence resource gmail is. They'd be mad to charge for it.

I already pay for google to manage a custom domain's emails at $5/email. What does "private" mean in this case? Am I missing a free tier option?

They used to have a free tier. They stopped offering it about 10 years ago but existing users were grandfathered in and it continued to be free. But no more.

10+ years ago Google offered gmail with custom domains for free. When they started charging e.g. the service you're paying $5 per month for the old users remained grandfathered into that free tier.

They changed that in the past few weeks, now everyone who's been getting free gmail with custom domain for 10+ years has to pay.

OP is wondering if they will start to charge for user@gmail.com accounts as well.

You need a GMail account to use an Android phone, so I'd say the chances of that happening are pretty slim. There are a sizable margin of Android devices that exist for the purpose of being cheap gateways into other paid services. If, overnight, you suddenly needed a subscription service just to use the phone, I'm willing to bet a substantial number of them would immediately go into the trash.

You need a Google account to use most Android phones. You can have a Google account without a Gmail account.

I agree but for lots of people who get an android phone it's not an obvious difference.

I don't think it will ever happen. That being said, I have been wanting to move to Outlook.com, but I have a custom domain email. Currently it's allowed in Gmail because it's using an external smtp server from Mailgun. But in order to add/accept a custom domain in Outlook you have to have your domain with GoDaddy (if you aren't O365) which I simply refuse to do.

I'm confused. AFAIK you can use google docs for free. What you can't do for free is register your own domain and then register that with Google Workspace. Am I wrong?

The first, using docs, is you as an individual user and is still free AFAIK.

The 2nd, is you having an organization with multiple users and admin accounts that can control what those user can do with docs and other google services, (like can't share outside the org, can transfer docs between accounts like when someone leaves, etc....). This is the one that has not been free for a while and that Google recently tried to push a few legacy free users to be paid.

Personally I switched to paid from free long ago. As an individual user it's still worth it to me to pay Google a measly $6 a month to run my email for my domain. It's still my domain and I can switch if I need to. I back up my docs as well just in case. Further, their support as a paid user has been great so far. Every time I've contacted them they've gotten back to me quickly and been very helpful.

I don't think that will happen. Possibly that they offer some paid upgrade. But I don't think they will ask everyone to pay.

They already do offer paid upgrades for more space: Google One https://one.google.com/about

Google have lots of little, ill-fitting appendages attached to the mothership. Just like Apple have their App Store (a cash cow) and MS have Edge and a variety of awkward apps bogging Windows down. They don't fit in well with the overall image and vision of those companies and are not really sustainable long term. I think gmail is liable to get axed one day when google gets tired of it. I think that day is still a long way away. But like all of the above, i wonder if google takes (free) gmail seriously.

Yandex Mail has subscription plan for ad-free web interface. Incidentally, it is separate from Yandex Plus subscription (something like Amazon Prime for Yandex services).

Google already charges for continued use of private Google accounts that have exceeded their storage limit.

Users can create another account to keep receiving mail, but you can't even configure the overflown old one to forward to the new one.

A strategy for using Gmail is to create a main account which you keep below the storage limit, always. Set up that main facade account to forward e-mail to some other Gmail account, and delete it.

We'll see the storage space for Google Drive being cut down drastically or features held back, long before they'll start thinking of charging for Gmail. The reason is that Gmail is part of their advertising platform.

For Gmail, I expect that they'll add more ads instead to make more money. Perhaps they'll try to squeeze more money out of companies that depend on email marketing.

They already do, just in another currency.

Can we please finally stop pretending these products are „free“? I mean, at least in a community such as HN.

I would gladly pay if I knew I was going to get committed service. I live in fear that someday the Algorithm will decide I am naughty and lock me out of my digital life.

I have considered enrolling in a Workspace plan, but I hear any number of gotchas because it is not the happy path, and X workflow is not supported for paid plans. That is, a worse product, even if you pay.

> I live in fear that someday the Algorithm will decide I am naughty and lock me out of my digital life.

That fear became too much for me after getting locked out twice of my main Gmail account (which has been my 'life' for 15 years) last November. I was able to recover it, but some have not been able to.

Now I use Fastmail, and am migrating all Google, Amazon, SaaS etc. service I can to self-hosting. The transition is taking months in my spare time, and there's some expense, but I feel the 'free' party is truly over now.

It kinda already does because Gmail shares the storage space with all other Google services. I found that recently when I started getting message like please buy more storage or else you will not be able to receive emails. I got around that by deleting some old junk on my google drive but I wonder how long I would be able to do that in future.

In reality they already do via the max storage that comes with a free account, and this has fallen over the years I believe. Conceivably, they could lower this to the point where anyone who has had an account for more than 5 years will likely run out of room, which could be a big windfall revenue wise but will piss off users.

There are no successful competitors in the space that charge money. Who would be stupid enough to take a dominant market position that purely benefits them and attempt to monetize it? Email is a commodity market and it hasn't been shown that anyone is willing to pay for a premium en-masse.

I see no risk here.

In some way, Google is already charging for personal accounts via storage for Photos. I's risk to say it is the most relevant G service for a person/family these days. Far more relevant than email, which is becoming more and more irrelevant next to IMs and push notifications.

I doubt they’d ever charge for email. It’s one big source of data to feed to the mothership.

People would move as long as there are similar quality free services. I don't think they could get away with it. Maybe they can charge for archival storage if you break a big threshold that implies you're a power user with $$.

People would move as long as there are similar quality free services

But are there? Everyone knows Gmail. Gmail is so ubiquitous that when signing up for some things online, the systems sometimes pre-fill "@gmail.com" for the user.

People will leave Gmail at the same rate they leave Facebook — very slowly. And because of the same reasons. Everyone they know, all of their mailing lists, newsletters, coupons, etc... are already on Gmail. They don't want to have to track down a couple of hundred sources and tell them a new e-mail address.

E-mail is very sticky. People on HN who don't work directly with the public typically don't understand that there are MILLIONS and MILLIONS of @hotmail.com, @att.net, @earthlink.net, @aol.com, @yahoo.com, and other "legacy" e-mail addresses that are very active.

And before the usual HN ageism kicks in, I'm current working with a dataset that involves about 200,000 Americans in ten states between 18 and 45, and nearly 5% of them are on @aol.com.

That's a lot of effort to migrate your email to something else

I would gladly pay for GMail as long as it includes an actual contract, where I would know my paid-for service is not going to be arbitrarily terminated for a random AI reason (or any reason, short of a legal requirement).

They already do, if you want more than 15GB of storage space.

They make it stupid hard to delete big e-mails quickly, and the interface is super super slow so that you just go "fuck it" and pay the $2/month

Never since that’ll mean they’ll have to support the users in some way.

google deprecated the free "google apps for your domain" plan nearly a decade ago, so you probably don't have anything to worry about for a little while on personal gmail.

Free services which require login all easy tracking and spying. If folk paid for it then they'd not want to be spied on. We're the product because it's free.

We would be product even if it were not free.

They're already monetizing it by 1) charging for more storage 2) making it extremely easy and painless to upgrade to Google Workspace. Zero training needed.

Having ability to read your emails and profile by that seems to be more profitable right now; when that changes it will become paid or discontinued.

I always wonder why Google don't start charging for Gmail accounts for non-OECD countries or other countries where the ad rate means they make a loss.

Because everyone there will move to first available free email alternative. Everyone else can easily pursue the same business model. Instead of gathering data for other services, other providers will build profiles and just target the users with paid email campaigns.

Lower ad price area means almost same as lower income, so they can't charge.

We "pay" for it now with ads and surveillance.

Would I welcome a pay tier where I'm still surveilled? No.

Would I welcome a pay tier without surveillance? Sign me up now.

If you mean charge for Gmail in general then that's never going to happen. There's too much money in mining email content/advertising.

Eh, I think they probably don't want to drive anyone off the platform so they can still gather user info/preferences for their ad system.

10-12 years I imagine.

Now the current generation has been hooked future generations will pay. "There's gold in them thar hills".

I'd argue that Workspace accounts (that start at $6/mo) are already private(ish?) paid Gmail accounts.

larger question of what is the future of email, is there a major useful replacement coming, will privacy concerns in the provider or protocol force an update (a new snowden-type event), and why has their webmail interface gotten so clunky and bad

For anyone seeking a nice alternative to gmail and not so pricey I recommend Migadu: https://migadu.com. I used them til this month as I moved to iCloud+ Mail with custom domains for convenience. Yet I really recommend Migadu to everyone! :)

Out of all the public email providers out there, how many of them charge?

Free was always a scam.

Here's an OSS privacy-focused alternative for anyone needing to switch: https://forwardemail.net

It already charges, just not with money.

we're already paying for it, just not with money

Free services will continue for as long as surveillance capitalism is legal, and advertising is profitable. The majority of their revenue comes from ads, i.e. YouTube, and ads in Gmail and on Google's SERP.

They probably already generates a lot of revenue from scanning user's emails. If they were to make Gmail a paid service, they would probably lose a lot of people. Moreover, they are not necessarily competitive against other established paid email services.

They don't do that anymore (for advertising purposes anyway) and a lot of companies have stopped sending purchase details in emails anyway (like Amazon) to prevent Google from building up a database of purchases.

Gmail makes people sign in to Google, making it easy to track searches

100% I wish more people understood this about the value of gmail to google. People sign in because of gmail. Signed-in users enjoy much better search quality. It's a big win.

I get lousy quality also when I'm logged in.

Even more funny I recently got asked captchas while being logged in with a paid account with a long history of human activity and no bot activity.

Usually it triggers when I try to cut through the "intelligent" cr#p they serve me anytime I look for something that doesn't have many hits. (Crazy not so fun fact: even when they have a perfect match they always seems to prioritize something else that I can only relate to my query by looking through ai glasses and squinting really hard.)

Try searching for something really specific, use double quotes liberally or use

allintext: <search terms goes here> and see how long it goes before you trigger the captcha ;-)

> stopped sending purchase details in emails anyway (like Amazon)

Amazon.co.uk still sends order emails with item details, prices, delievery date & delievery address.

any source that talks about that? gmail is a wealth of information for Google that is almost certainly monetized six ways to Sunday.

I'm more concerned that GMail will be shut down, just like most other useful Google products and services. They'll tell everyone to go use this messaging app they released last month.

I feel very confident that search and email are the last two services they’ll shut down.

I agree with your point, but I think ads would be in that list!

I could see YouTube outliving gmail.

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