Google Workspace increasing prices from April 11, 2023
workspace.google.com
workspace.google.com
I pay more per month to the calendar scheduling SaaS provider I use than I do to Google - who provide the calendar plus email, drive, docs, meet, etc.
An important lesson here for founders is price anchoring. Google is in a tough place because the prices are anchored to historically low amounts - they're increasing them by $1/m because that's about all they can do and the talk of 'all the next value' is their best attempt to break out of that anchor. If they were to bring this suite to the market today, I bet it would start at the $20/m mark.
Even then Outlook does have FindTime and has a plugin system to let you use third party tools like Calendly. There's also a product called Microsoft Bookings that's more of a direct competitor to Calendly. But at the end of the day Calendly's revenue is estimated at around $100 million from what I could find online and that's a drop in the bucket for Microsoft or Google.
Edit: someone mentioned in thread that Gsuite supports this natively now, so I suppose my question is more MS focused.
MS Bookings is pretty similar, but last I checked was more work to setup for an individual than Calendly.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/business/sched...
Their mobile app has a Send Availability function, which I can’t find in the desktop apps at all.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/how-do-i-send-my-...
And there’s also the ability to insert your calendar into an email from the desktop app. This is more coarse grained than the mobile app feature, and it basically sticks a table with your availability for some time period in an email.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/send-an-outlook-c...
I use Calendly
Value of easy scheduling of my time is worth the money of the extra vendor.
Maybe people just really prefer Gmail? I know people have negative feelings toward Microsoft Teams.
I guess with Google Workspace, I'm not quite sure how it's that different from what people are used to getting for free (other than with corporate permissions). Google's $6 plan doesn't really include much for storage and their $12 feels like Microsoft's $6 plan.
If Google is in a tough place, I'd argue it's because they anchored their pricing to free with their consumer offerings. You're not wrong that Workspaces provides a lot of value compared to a lot of subscriptions. At the same time, it's something people are accustomed to getting for free and the $6 plan doesn't really offer much on top of their free services. Microsoft is throwing storage at their low-tier plan - offering a clear differentiator from their free service. Microsoft is offering their Office suite for their mid-tier plan - something that is a $440 purchase or $12/mo over the course of 3 years; you're basically getting all the services for free for the price of Microsoft Office. Microsoft is offering lots of device management tools that businesses need in their high-tier plan.
You are totally right that Google's pricing is low for some definition of low. Lots of SaaS that does a lot less costs more. It's just that Microsoft seems to be throwing more value for your dollar at the problem. If you're going to be buying the Office suite for a lot of your employees, wouldn't it make more sense to buy Microsoft 365? Or are Google's services so superior that you'd rather pay twice? That's not a rhetorical question, it's just been a while since I've had a basis of comparison.
Ultimately, you're right. It's kinda silly for businesses to quibble over even $50/mo/user given that they might be paying their employees more than that per hour. But I think that people aren't always rational when it comes to pricing and Microsoft is likely counting on that with their offering.
It’s sad to see the “digital magic economies” of software slowly transform to normal commodity slow price increases to support brands and locked in markets.
I guess it will be a race to suck between Office and Google.
I hope an innovator comes along and provides a software layer on top of cloud storage like Dropbox (that isn’t tied to a particular storage like Dropbox is). Software should cost $100/year for your entire life.
Without commenting on the specific of Google Workspace, in general, this makes sense if you’ve added a bunch of additional value.
In fact, ironically, Slack’s antitrust complaint against MS re: Teams is precisely the fact that they bundled all this additional functionality in without charging extra for it.
Now we pay $10/mo. If you average it out, it's not too different than just paying for the added value as it grows.
And worse, if I cancel I don't keep to keep using it without the added value. So I'm painted in a corner. It's objectively worse in that sense.
This seems like they are using a marketing plan from the boxed software days to justify a price increase today. I wonder if there’s a 90s Microsoft person who was tasked with a back strategy after Google decided they wanted higher profits or slower growth or some reason that has nothing to do with reflecting value.
I think there’s some places where SaaS makes a lot of sense. And storage costs and high data transfer volume…. It makes sense.
There’s a balance. Modern software leans too heavily to subscriptions though.
Thread B: WTF, I have to pay for a web site?
For me it wasn't really anything to do with the cost, just a token decision to opt out of the google hegemony over email to some degree. Been well over a year at this point and I don't miss gmail at all.
Apple iCloud+ will let you have up to five custom domains, with up to three personalised email addresses per domain for just 0.79p (UK)
If you are just looking for email, that's shockingly good value. You do get iCloud Docs with that too, but that product offering is a bit naff and iOS/iPadOS/macOS only.
If you are using Apple products, it's very good value for money.
On Linux I would just go to icloud.com to access my Apple email, notes, etc. I wish there was an easier solution but iCloud access on Linux sucks.
I can understand the point about Notes being accessible only from a browser, but why isn’t IMAP an option to access email on Linux?
I migrated from Google Workspace when Apple added custom domain support. The email migration itself was simple — I used `imapsync` and followed the instructions below. It's been several months since the move, and I can report that it all "just works".
https://blah.cloud/miscellaneous/migrating-google-workspaces...
Granted we're a bootstrapped business so our economics are important to me. Workspaces was just too expensive for the service provided. Microsoft Office was cheaper back in it's hayday.
> While these directions let you send emails from a custom email alias at your domain, email recipients can still find your personal Gmail address if they inspect the email headers.
To me, this is no replacement for a mailbox on my own domain.
I move from Zoho to Fastmail a year later and it’s a much slicker experience.
(Just mail, I didn’t use any of Zoho’s collaborative tools.)
I have the most experience with MS365. It's slow and so much configuration is asynchronous that sometimes I feel like I'm dialing in for a non-deterministic adventure.
And Meet is amazing. The only video conferencing system I've used that actually works reliably. I recently moved from a company using Zoom to one using Meet and the difference is insane. Makes a step difference to the quality of remote work.
I presume they can do it because Google owns their own global network and they can use high QoS on it for Meet data.
I also find Google Sheets to be inferior to Excel, and we have Office licenses for myself and a few others that use spreadsheets.
The only thing I think is good with Workspace is Gmail and Calendar. Everything else is kind of meh.
I used to have Google Hangouts/Meet problems all the time, but it was fine, I've never cared for Zoom in general. Google's slide deck program is fine, but that's largely just because...who cares about slides? Most people aren't paying much attention to them, and they are just meeting filler.
I do prefer Gmail's interface to Outlook's though. Outlook tries to do too much. It's definitely better than it used to be, but there are some very crucial annoyances.
It is worth noting one of the features you give up is any sense of security or privacy what so ever. Not in the "omg google is spying on me" paranoia sense, but in the real Zoho hires the absolute cheapest developers in the world to build everything sense.
I've literally stopped reporting bugs to them because they can't grasp the flaws I am trying to point out.
Sev0 security issues aren't secret just because people who mean well don't talk about them, any sufficiently high valued target is going to have well funded threat actors working to find vulnerabilities. By publicly disclosing the issues, you let other customers know their data is threatened, and then customers can work together to force vendors to fix issues.
A little bit of PR buzz and customer complaints can get a handful of issues fixed, but this is a bit more systemic.
Works beautifully
I do miss Gmail, but it's easy to workaround it
Now each user can only share a Google Doc with 5 non-Google users per month. This limitation seems entirely artificial and designed entirely to push people onto more expensive plans.
I wish I could prepay for the next 10 years to lock in at this price.
How much does a petabyte of redundant hard drive storage cost? Yeah.. will probably still be more than $2,500 USD in 10 years.
For Workspace accounts there probably isn't an option for end-users to pay for a year ahead. For resellers like me, we used to get discounts a few years ago if we had clients go on annual contracts. They removed those discounts so we steered the majority of clients to flex plans.
If that wasn't enough of a motivation to go flex, whatever clown MBA's run this division of Google decided it would be fun to create a new certification system for resellers over the past couple years. We didn't complete the 12 hours or so of Powerpoints and exams so while I can provision new customers if I have an annual contracted customer smack the resource limits I can't actually upgrade their license unless I rage at Google Partner connect to override and do it for me. Leaving customers on flex gives us the ability to upgrade and downgrade at will. It's literally the only company I've ever dealt with that makes it this hard to upgrade to a higher paid contract, they just leave money on the table. There's absolutely no incentive for a small reseller like me to upsell an annual contract that chains my hands, this notice that the discounts are coming back is such a joke.
In the meantime..
R.I.P. $7/mo unlimited storage plan.
As a sidenote, I'm disappointed by how slowly HDD capacity has been increasing the last few years.
100MB -> 1GB: 10x Was amazing
5GB -> 20GB: 4x Amazing
40GB -> 250GB: Hell yeah!
...
Nowadays the rate of increase is way down. 10TB -> 20TB: 0.5x meh. In the next 5 years we _might_ get a 30TB drive? Yawn.
But, they can't tell us by how much?
Starter: $6 -> $7.20
Standard: $12 -> $14.40
Plus: $18 -> $21.60
They are also introducing an annual payment option where you can pay the old per-month prices ($6, $12, $18).
Starter: $5 -> $6
Standard: $10 -> $12
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/new-pricing-f...
This nets to ~45% price increase in just 3.5 years.
then dumped it, effectively raising the price
now they've raised the price again and have and brought the annual plan back as a "discount"
(no doubt the annual plan will disappear again as another stealth price increase)
Last week they stressed us out emailing us about a few users reaching resource limits and rather than name the customers they just sent a CSV with some Google internal customer_id we aren't privy to. A day later they corrected it using another faceless id that is at least on our billing statements.
It looks like an excellent solution for SMBs or larger who have a dedicated admin that can tend to it.
For a nobody like me, it was a hot goddamned mess. Death by a few big cuts and thousands of small ones.
These are the things that bothered me most, in no particular order:
- Microsoft has a migration service to move email, calendars, and contacts into 365 from Workspace! Wanna find it? Good luck! It's buried (IMO) deep into the onboarding documentation. Finding it was not obvious at all.
- The migration service also didn't work! I had a few years of emails and calendars in my Workspace. It would frequently error out due to API timeouts, even while transferring. While I was eventually able to get (most of?) my emails into 365, I had to import my calendar and contacts manually. (I wasn't confident that 365 got _all_ of my emails either.)
- 365 and Google don't map contact fields one for one. As a result, while I had all of my contacts on my devices, their numbers were missing. Fixing this took longer than I wanted it to.
- "OneDrive" for Business is a complete joke compared to Google Drive. Microsoft's offering is "here's a 30GB SharePoint installation". This was particularly troublesome for me given that my wife and I have a shared folder on Google Drive and an equivalent on OneSharePoint wasn't immediately obvious.
- There are 750 billion different Admin panels! You can configure everything in your Workspace tenant from admin.google.com. On 365? You'll need to use admin.exchange for your mail, Azure (!!!) for your authentication, portal.office.com for some other stuff, etc.
- 365 enables passwordless auth through Authenticator, which is a good thing, but this also disables IMAP login, which is not good.
- Due to Microsoft pushing admins to use PowerShell more often several years ago, there are many configuration options that cannot be done by UI. You need to do it via PowerShell. While this isn't a problem for me (PowerShell used to be my primary language years and years ago), this is a problem when I want to make a change that took less than five minutes to do on Workspace.
- In the year of Our Lord 2023, Microsoft thinks it's appropriate to give Microsoft 365 users at 50GB inbox by default. 50! GIGABYTES!
- Exchange's anti-spam filtering is outrageously aggressive! This was the final straw for me. A lot of really important email would get sent to Junk (which has an auto-delete policy by default!) I had to check my Junk folder every day, something I haven't needed to do in years on Google Workspace. I'm sure there's a setting deep within admin.exchange to tune this, but it was not obvious when I looked.
So while I'm not a huge fan of paying Google $12/month ($20/mo now), it's still the best solution for people like me who want more than what Gmail and Calendar can provide but not an entire enterprisey solution.
Migrating mail into MS365 is a terrible experience. I've set up over 30 tenants and migrated mail for them and there's no good tooling. Both the Microsoft options and all the 3rd party options I've tried do an extremely poor job or error handling and reconciliation.
Microsoft's IMAP sync is so bad at reconciliation that IMO it's reasonable to call the data integrity rating a lie. I've dealt with some really small mailboxes where you could almost grok the data just by skimming it and the (number of message) counts for imported mail were flat out wrong.
With the amount of money they charge per user per month you'd think there would be some incentive to create migration tooling that isn't hot trash, but maybe that's just me.
What’s OMicrosoft 365?
What?
All the end-user tools are on office.com
For OneDrive, yes the backend is Sharepoint, but a normal user won’t need to go there.
Probably yes for a few of my clients. They're only using the email and calendars, and only via applications (Mac/iOS Mail/Calendar, Outlook, or TB). Two of them started on the free one. Primarily staying with GSuite has been a matter of inertia and ensuring delivery, all the other stuff is worthless. This will probably be motivation to make the move this time. Other companies might have kept and "basics only tier", but I just don't think Google is serious about anything but ads when it comes to money. Even their subscription stuff seems frequently poorly supported, though perhaps it's better for the biggest players.
I'm very thankful I always pushed hard against webmail, had registrar/DNS independent and so on. It's added friction in some cases but means switching is pretty transparent. Lots don't have that luxury of course, but it's been nice here.
Mostly from companies who chose Microsoft before G Suite became popular for business.
But maybe it's industry-dependent?
In any case, you definitely need consultants because it's a pain no matter which direction you're going. Not a decision to take lightly, and you're not going to switch again for another 15 years.
Migrating contacts and calendars is easy, thanks to open standards (unless you're migrating in bulk)
Migrating email and validating the migration is a HUGE pain and takes forever.
Data from any other Google service is basically unusable anywhere else. Yes, you can export it via Google Takeout, but they are all but proprietary.
Ehhhhh, Workspace has a half-assed EAS implementation that works until it doesn't (just had a client where it stopped exporting all his phone numbers, the data was still in Google but their EAS just wasn't outputting it). It's hardly an open standard but theoretically works for Outlook users migrating to Exchange.
Going anywhere else with an Outlook desktop user that actually follows the open standards (CardDav/CalDav) is extreme pain because Outlook lacks native support, so you need to use a plugin that will pull the data but not present it in the same way. The earlier mentioned client I moved to Fastmail and I still haven't figured out how to get his 'contact folders' to show and sync in Outlook without heavily customizing the views. Otherwise works in Android with DavX and iOS natively.
If it works. I tried to use Takeout to split an 18GB archive into chunks last month. After waiting all night for Takeout to prepare the download for me... it gave me a single 18GB archive to download.
I was recently at a startup that did this. Honestly, it was pretty simple.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/moveto...
https://support.google.com/google-workspace-individual/answe... (for individual) https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2736362?hl=en (for Drive) - I don't see it for Admin but it's probably the same.
Here's one for Google Workspace Admin: "The Annual Plan charges you for the exact number of licenses you signed up for through a yearly commitment." The "commitment" makes it sound non-refundable. https://support.google.com/a/answer/1230658?hl=en
> Vendor lock-in refers to a situation where the cost of switching to a different vendor is so high that the customer is essentially stuck with the original vendor. Because of financial pressures, an insufficient workforce, or the need to avoid interruptions to business operations, the customer is "locked in" to what may be an inferior product or service.
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/cloud/what-is-vendor-loc...
A practical example of vendor lock-in is an elderly aunt with mine who has an email address from her ISP. She isn't "contractually obligated" to continue using that email, nor the ISP. The ISP certainly doesn't have a monopoly on email. But the effort to switch from an email that she's been using for 15 years is very high for someone with weak tech skills. I'm probably in a similar situation with Gmail, as it's the primary contact by which most people know me. I can't take my Gmail address and port it; I have to create a new email and get people to update their address books.
But I don't really feel "locked in" to the apartment. Maybe it needs a better, more accurate phrase. "Switching friction"? That more accurately describes the situation than "lock in".
There is significant lock-in with email because:
1 - Email migration sucks and if you're a big org, this process can/will be complicated, expensive and carry potential down time for end-users.
2 - The bigger you are, the less willing you are to go through with #1 without a really, really ridiculously good reason
Migration is so painful some companies are still emailing from unpatched Exchange 2007 servers under the IT guy's desk.
I don't think normal people will be using a PWA for chat on desktop computers and like it. The lack of an option for a normal clean native client on desktops is astounding to me. reference) https://support.google.com/chat/answer/9455386?hl=en
Additionally if a legacy user that had extra storage accidentally lets the renewal lapse you can not repurchase it, you are forced to upgrade all users to a higher tier at a ridiculous cost.
I'm giving Tutanota a try and use other self hosted services for photos and drive.