Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups
googleenterprise.blogspot.com
googleenterprise.blogspot.com
When I see ridiculous sugar coating it breeds distrust and disbelief - congratulations Google, I now believe every single future thing you say a little less, well done.
By cutting off ad-supported free users, Google is attempting to pursue a global maxima: rather than making the best 'free-enterprise email/document sharing/whatever else it does because I only use it for email', they're now free to focus their efforts on paying customers. I suspect the one area where this will impact the most is customer service; Google is traditionally horrible because they're loathe to waste money on minimum wage call-centre employees to support loss-leader products. Now that Apps for Domains will be a first-class, revenue generating product, maybe they'll answer the damn phone.
Blabling 'but time has shown that in practice, the experience isn't quite right for either group' when a statement about ~ we are sorry to remove the free ad supported option would have been the honest way.
I just wanted an email for my domain and that's not worth 50 bucks a year. I'll just set up my own email system at this point, call it a learning experience and never be exposed to the rest of whatever was in Google Apps.
(And, when I was first doing this, someone trying to hire me for a job couldn't email me, because their hosting provider was once friendly to spammers and my aggressive blacklisting rejected their TCP connections. Oops.)
Running an email server is hard and very few people regret paying an expert to do it for them.
(As many HN readers know, I work for Google. But I'm not telling you that you should or should not use Google's product here, only that running an email server is not trivial.)
And?
Free users threatening to leave are hilarious (even better when they campaign against ad targeting and AdBlock everything). Google's decision pretty clearly signals that users like you aren't worth it to the company any more than Google Apps are worth $50 to you. Don't do business. That's the point of a market.
I wouldn't pay for it either - I'm grateful that my Google Apps are grandfathered, but nobody is entitled to GMail, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It's a voluntary transaction between two entities and, in this case, you and Google Apps aren't a good fit.
Then there's spam... don't even get me started on spam filtering. For me personally $50/year is a bargain considering that running, maintaining, patching a mail server is time consuming and has no real upside.
As a learning experience it's fine, but in practice delivering mail (reliably) sucks hard.
I always thought of free Google Apps as the company's brilliant play to control the fabric of the business internet. Can you name anything in the digital realm more important to businesses and organizations of all sizes than long-form communication (email) and content and information-driven collaboration?
Sadly for new users and for Google itself, the company's actions reveal a failure to recognize Apps as anything more than a collection of inter-related services ready for more aggressive monetization. Management fails to see the strategic benefit and leverage afforded by controlling the online fabric of every new business that starts operating as a small team. It's the type of short-term and profit-driven thinking that afflicts so many companies as they reach the complacency of scale.
How much do you make per hour? How many hours do you expect to spend per year maintaining your own email system?
How much would you pay to stop one hacker, one time, from reading your private email?
Are you going to bother to set up two-factor authentication, or just wing it?
For a lot of people, $50 a year would make total sense.
I'm lucky in that I already have Google Apps and they're not starting to charge me. But if I didn't I'd look at whether there are reasonable free/cheap alternatives out there.
For customers it looks like the end of free Gmail-for-your-domain. But for competitors I imagine it looks like the end of price gouging.
Let me make a few recommendations. I'm not a sysadmin by trade but I know a few things you can do that will improve your lot in life running mail.
- Postfix and Dovecot. They have the right combination of ease of use, power and security. Don't overconfigure; try to get it working with basic settings first and then evolve it towards what you dream of rather than setting out to configure it that way first.
- SPF and DKIM. I have no trouble getting messages to Gmail and I think this is part of why.
- Make sure your hosting provider is not huge and very high quality. I chose RootBSD because they're small but highly technical. If you have a lot of spare cash, iNetU are quite good and sometimes help with FreeBSD. The larger or crappier the host is, the more likely you'll wind up in blacklisted IP space. (BSD hosting companies tend to be smaller and more technical, and BSD is great software, so I'd recommend that if you're interested.) Getting off a blacklist isn't a lot of fun and it's not hard to wind up on one, but I find being on a discriminating host is a good preventative measure.
- Rely on IMAP. If you want webmail, try and find one that is really just an IMAP frontend. I tried and liked Roundcube a while back; these days I have IMAP clients everywhere so I don't know what the new hot stuff is, but IMAP is fantastic.
- I strongly recommend you get an account with DNSReport.com. Their software can detect most of the DNS problems you can get yourself into that wreak havoc with mail. Odds are good you'll be doing a lot more DNS than before, it's a great tool to have in the toolbox.
- Stay on top of your security updates. I recommend running sshguard and whatever other security software/IDS/firewall type stuff you can stand. Make sure you're not giving out a bunch of shell accounts with root on this server. Seems obvious, but people forget or get lazy. FreeBSD will email you a security message every day; if something like that isn't coming your way, consider trying to set it up. It tells me, among other things, who tried to log into the server, how many times they failed, what their IP was, and lots of other stuff.
There are a number of nice upsides to running your own mail server.
- Email can be hooked up to the database various ways.
- Automatic emailing for free (keep an eye on it).
- Scripted email handling for free (Procmail etc).
- Get system-generated messages emailed (Nagios/monit etc., login/sudo failures, etc.)
- Advanced forwarding/wildcard accounts.
Anyway, I hope you do give it a shot despite the nay-saying. Cost-effective? No, but it's a blast, and many of the upsides would be hard to replicate with Gmail. Of course the web mail UI will be worse. Tradeoffs.
For example, Live (Microsoft service)[1] or Yandex (Russian google vis-a-vis). [2][3]
[3] Major caveat: the interface is in Russian only now, but after initial setup it shouldn't be a big deal;
At $50 / year for Google it's cheaper to buy a domain from GoDaddy and pay for email services (webmail + IMAP) that are automatically tied to your domain.
We also run an email system at work, though it's a lot more work than other services - mostly due to spam / deliveriabilty - so even if you do pay $50/yr still seems a bargain. IMHO you need 100+ users to even think about justifying the time cost for running a mail server yourself.
Also, I get access to all the new Google stuff without having to wait for Google to make it 'business-ready'.
Email is a solved problem that is totally worth it to outsource or pay someone else to manage in-house. If you feel comfortable setting up your own mail server, managing spam, updating it, etc., and WANT to do it, then you're probably not Google's target audience, anyway.
Free is only really free if you don't value your time.
Somewhat offtopic, but I always find statements like this rather silly on HN, a site ostensibly focused on and for the startup community. You mention in a comment below that you've worked for several startups. While there, did you only make decisions at the expense of your users to maximize profits?
If not, that's enough evidence to prove your statement wrong.
Most decisions like this are more complicated. While it does make the "I just reserved a domain name and want a google-hosted webmail client for it as soon as possible" case more complicated in the future (and I have one too), in most HN threads on google's poor customer service someone will inevitably bring up the fact that they'd be willing to pay money to get phone support for their Google Apps accounts, even though you've been able to do that for quite some time now. In fact, the whole second paragraph in the article seems to be about businesses that sign up for free, and don't actually understand the limits they accepted in turn.
Eliminating a product for new customers actually can be a net positive in terms of good will of your customers, even if they have to pay more. The post is a little overly cheerful, like they just came up with this brilliant new idea, but your reaction is one better saved for things like finding out a device you own has DRM you didn't know about it, or a company removing something you've paid for with a remote kill switch.
I think you read a little more pejorative into that sentence than I intended (I understand why, it's a common phrasing in that sense). I mean it quite literally: they maximize profits by charging their users money (at their user's "expense") - not "for the overall detriment of their users" as you might (quite reasonably) interpret it.
But in this literal sense, yes, in every startup I've been involved in, we made decisions to make money and we planned for our users to pay that money. I'm not blaming Google for this - it's what businesses do (almost by definition!).
That being said, if this is this is a precursor to responding to complaints about access to Google customer service by giving all Google Apps business customers access to better support, it may make some sense.
What are you talking about? There is no sugar coating in this announcement, they just explain loud and clear what they are doing:
> With this in mind, we’ve decided to make things very straightforward. Starting today for all new customers:
Doesn't get more sugar free than this.
Maybe you were referring to Apple a few months ago when they announced their new maps?
I'll chalk this one down to the startup nature of this community, seeing as some are probably involved with competing products or are developing some, but the matter of fact is that this announcement is perfectly reasonable: “vanilla” gmail accounts are free, Apps accounts are not.
Those who already have free Apps will keep them at the same price, there doesn't seem to be any swindling involved, and look! phone support, imagine that.
I think what we're reacting to is that the free tier of Google Apps doesn't seem any different (from a cost perspective) from regular Gmail. They're giving me the same storage, showing me the same ads, providing the same no phone support, etc. The real difference is that I get a custom domain which doesn't cost anything to Google.
$50/user/year also seems expensive if you're not going to use the value-add of the business plans (phone support, 25GB inboxes, etc). Maybe Google could have kept the old system as well (7GB storage, ads) and charged $5/user/year for the vanity domain. $50 is just a lot for what is, frankly, more vanity value add than anything else for many of us. Yes, if you want 25GB inboxes, no ads, SLAs, etc. Google Apps can provide good value add, but I don't need those things.
Google is a private business. What they announced is reasonable for a private business trying to maximize profit. However, it feels less reasonable when one thinks about the cost to provide services. The free Google Apps shouldn't cost more than the free Gmail from Google's perspective. As such, I think it's human nature to say, "then why are you charging more?" "Because they can" is a perfectly reasonable answer, but it does make us think less of Google. Google is the company pushing the Nexus 4 down to $300 to try and prove that top-grade equipment can be more mass market rather than trying to maximize profit with a $500+ Nexus 4. That's the ethos and drive that we've come to love. What Google has done is perfectly reasonable and, in fact, better than most businesses would have done: most businesses wouldn't have grandfathered us in. However, it just doesn't feel like the same Google that turned so many businesses upside-down. In short, it doesn't feel like Gmail. Gmail came along with 1GB of free storage when you got ~10MB from competitors - and Google made it into a profit center pushing the bounds in a way that made them rich and improved our lives at the same time. This just feels like a regular business trying to make money - and that just doesn't feel like Google to us.
Again, I'm not saying that Google doesn't make a ton of money or that they shouldn't or whatnot. I'm merely pointing out that Google's profits often come alongside something that genuinely makes our lives better. Our world is better because Android exists. Our world is better because Google entered search. Our world is better for YouTube. Even AdSense brought relevant ads that were less obtrusive. They're all wonderful for Google too, but they pushed us forward. This doesn't feel like that. This feels like an MBA sitting in a room looking at the number of free Google Apps accounts and thinking "I bet we could convert some of those free-sign-ups into paid ones if we discontinued the free product in the future".
I want to emphasize that Google doesn't owe me anything, but when you see two services that cost the same to provision and one getting priced upward, it just feels icky.
For anyone who might be looking for an option for the future, Zoho offers a free tier for up to 3 inboxes: https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html.
To do this without having to manually create each address before I used it, I had to enable a catch-all address for my domain. Originally, I had my hosting provider (who are great) as the MX and they would simply forward it all on to Gmail. Well, sooner or later they determined that the massive amount of was killing their server, and politely asked if I could either disable the catch-all or find another MX (though they weren't firing me as a customer, yet). Even though my host has always been reasonable, $100ish/yr with them wasn't enough for me to use email the way that I intended.
This is where Google Apps comes in -- they are now my MX, and so my host is happy and my email arrives faster than it did before. In that light, $50/yr is a steal!
Being grandfathered in as free is a nice loyalty-builder, hopefully it stays free.
I actually started with Zoho a few years ago before switching to Google Apps. But, inability to sync contact and calendar, and use activesync with my android phone was a deal breaker for me.
I see that they offer Active Sync in free tier too. Does it actually work reliably?
There is no paradox. Some people are distrusting of free services, others are unwilling to pay. HN isn't one person's opinion, there are many diverse opinions represented in this community.
This looks to me just synonymous to killing a high maintenance, low returns project so that they can focus better on either the business version or other stuff. The "indirect" upside is you get other Google products of better quality.
While it was very popular we found it was quite costly and
we are not able to justify offering it as a free service on
an ongoing basis. Further we found that people who signed up
under free accounts often had false expectations about the
level of service and support we were able to give them and it
contributed to a negative overall perception of the service.
We apologize to those who are unable to use Google Apps in the
future because of this, but we feel it is an important change
to keep the service profitable and well supported into the future.I don't think the google apps business customers are this dumb. They aren't going to trick us with this kind of obvious double talk. We are just going to think they are being deceptive and be less understanding.
The wording was awful, and this and that go to show how long the 'don't be evil' mantra is dead.
I'm all for Google yanking their free Apps account. It's their product, and people can't rightly bitch about something free being removed from the market.
However, it's using politician-grade spin to try and convince smart people that 1=2 which is the insulting bit.
And I will especially distrust any new "free" services you decide to offer.
EDIT: phrasing
by offering <50 email accounts for free, Google essentially destroyed the market for any other startups or companies to come into the market and offer non-enterprise B2B email services... thus limiting competition and innovation.
One could argue that the removal of the free tier at this point is simply because they've created an entrenched position, but one could also suggest that this creates a modicum of opportunity for another player to try to enter this space.
Certainly until today the $ size of the addressable market in the small business email space was practically $0 given Google's position.
[discuss :)]
Rackspace Mail (formerly MailTrust) has about 200k paying customers for small business e-mail hosting. I've been paying them to host mail on 8 of my domains for years -- Gmail was never appealing to me for various reasons -- so the 24/7/365 support, daily backups and 100% uptime SLA easily made MT/Rackspace the right choice.
It's $2 per mailbox per month, or less than half Google's price, but there's a minimum of $10 a month -- so it's only cheaper if you have at least a couple mailboxes/users.
As an aside, Google also gives away web analytics for free, yet there's still a billion dollars a year spent at other web analytics firms. There are always ways to compete with free.
To be fair, Google Apps for Business didn't get going until 2007 which is also the year Rackspace acquired WebMai.us. I'd say the market for B2B email contracted severely the moment Google Apps's free offering became established.
Granted they're lacking the integration with all of Google's other services, but given how bad google's multi-account sessions are and the fact that basically everyone is logged into their personal gmail account already, that might actually be a good thing.
Plus, $50/yr/user adds up pretty darn quickly at scale. Not as much as all of these video services that cost about $100/yr, but like I said, the cost of switching email providers is insanely high - once you have a customer, it's almost guaranteed you'll have them forever unless you screw up at massive, catastrophic scale. Though because of that, you have to have a crazy-good hosted offering to get people to sign up in the first place; demoing a mail service is hard and Gmail (personal) has been a great way to show what their paid services offer for businesses.
When Google Reader was social & free (and without ads) it wasn't perfect but it was good enough to destroy competition.
The less said about fastmail.fm's "innovations" on their web interface the better.
Poor choice, imho. I'm curious what the actual overhead is for people like me. I have 1 account (as in: 1 email address) that is hosted by google apps. I was going to set up an account for one of my other domains, but not for $50/year. (Per account!)
So full snark here, but it was between google apps, and office 365. I chose GA because o my familiarity with it.
But look here, Microsoft's equivalent offering is free: https://domains.live.com/ I wonder what things will look like when we evaluate google apps next year?
See https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/google-appengine/pVZfd...
Unfortunately, I don't think threatening to leave when you're not paying anything is really a threat at all. $50/year per year is still pretty reasonable for the services provided.
The other option is that Google retires this feature completely, as they've done with other services people might have been willing to pay for, and that seems worse as you have no choice.
I understand this is effectively nothing for google; my point was that the reason we signed up for GA to begin with was directly related to my experience with it as a free way of hosting my personal domains' email.
Something we should all be learning from this is that it's free for now.
Its an annoyance at times setting live domains correctly. Also it doesn't support a catch all email address. :(
http://domains.live.com was actually far simpler and faster to setup than a free Google Apps account - which I've done probably 20 times and still struggle to figure out each time. MS version took me about two minutes and was extremely easy to understand - and I can't recall the last time I've signed up for an MS web product. Probably Hotmail in 2002 or something.
Great job Big G! lol
Oh well...
I wish they had just fixed the experience for "vanity domains" so that they didn't require all the enterprise features, and didn't let administrators have complete control of users accounts. Then they could roll out new features to vanity users without needing the enterprise controls.
I understand that this is a little tricky, and involves no paying customers, but Google Apps was by far the best experience for custom domains. I'm sure it attracted the type of influencers that pull even more users. I used it for my family, bands, friends with very small businesses and more, and the other people on those domains not already using Gmail, in turn migrated their personal accounts to Gmail.
Google's always been pretty good about making sure you aren't locked in to their services, likely due to the efforts of their Data Liberation Front[1], but it always seemed to me that being locked in to using an @gmail.com email address was a big exception to this.
It's worth some value to me, but $50/user/year is a bit much for a family of ~5 light email users.
The family / soccer club / non profit isn't going to spend $250 for five email addresses. I am sure there are other providers that offer similar services for much cheaper - and if not there is a big opportunity.
I can't tell you how many small forays into new business ideas I and other folks I know have used google apps to kick off. For a business at high risk of failure and no budget in the early idea stages it was so useful to be able to stitch together a team and workflow really quickly using google apps to see how things pan out. This puts a real damper on kicking off new collaborative ideas
If you want a guide, this one seems pretty good: http://www.omegaweb.com/2012/09/how-to-configure-a-custom-do...
Between the mistaken despair over having no good free alternatives to Google Apps and the platitudes and awe over the Gmail/Google Drive integration (which Hotmail/Skydrive have had the exact equivalent of for years) a couple weeks back, I'm starting to wonder why nobody here, when they are all quite tech-literate, seems to have any clue about Microsoft's honestly rather impressive cloud offering.
Most likely they're all in denial.
I for one had no clue about such an offering.
This method is actually far more convenient than setting up Google Apps. You can both send and receive mail at the other domain, and you get a unified inbox (which Google Apps never provided).
No, I don't mind the end of free Google Apps. I use Google Apps for my business for five years, and frankly, it is mind-boggling what they have given me for free. Luckily us existing users still get the free service, but if I had to pay US$50 per year per user, I would still consider it exceptional value.
US$50 per year for a set of critical, heavily-used services is an inconsequential amount for all but the most penny-pinching operation.
If so, that's a huge bummer. I only recently switched to running my email this way and I don't relish the thought of migrating elsewhere so soon.
I would happily pay $50/year (or perhaps more... I don't know how high I'd go) for email that's not only convenient and spam free, but also well protected from governments and the provider's employees, and not data mined.
I have absolutely no use for phone support or 99.9 uptime for my personal email. So the businessification of Google mail is not a win for me. Privacy and convenience or what I'm after.
Anyone working on something like this?
I'd also note that the $50/year is also per user, so there's sort of an opening to offer a family, personal domain type service. For a family of a maybe 2-6 users, the $50/year-user is a bit steep if you're mostly looking for a small group email + calendaring. Maybe that would even be an interesting vector for starting a new family-based social networking service.
I actually considered an email address like firstname@lastname.com. I figured I could add my parents, or future children.
But this only works for obscure last names or unusual TLDs. There's also the issue of family relationships - people get divorced, grow up and want more independence, etc. Marrying email to a family domain could be messy.
So this move is going to add $600 per year to our costs - all for virtual accounts that don't actually use Google Apps at all.
Hopefully this was unintended, and Google will continue to provide free accounts for domains linked to Appengine apps - or provide another mechanism for linking and authorising sending addresses.
> Please note this change has no impact on our existing customers, including those using the free version.
So after today (no more free accounts) if I want to set up example.com as a domain to send email from on my Google AppEngine webapp, I will have to fork over X amount of money a year to have those essentially non-existent users that are valid mailboxes.
1) On giving too much away…
Remember, Google Apps started with 200 free users, later reduced it to 100, then to 50, then to 10 and now to zero.
http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/23/google-puts-the-squeeze-on-...
At 200 free users, there was no room for a new entrant in the market. I am glad that didn't last long.
2) On Charging too low...
Back when they launched it, $50/user/year was extremely aggressive pricing. Vendors were charging $50/month. May be Google is realizing they were charging too low. I now see an additional plan with $10/user/month option (which didn't exist earlier).
Disclaimer: I work for Zoho, competition to Google Apps.
And when Google Apps first started, you could request to increase the number of free users. I have an old account with a quota of 500 free users.
However, I'm still used to Gmail's web interface, so I redirect my mail there.
Somewhere in the mindless fighting with becoming the dominant social and mobile force on the planet, it has forgotten about the very users it once strived to please.
This has been more apparent since Larry took over Google as the CEO. His "more wood behind fewer arrows" has somewhere down the line taken away the humor with which Google has largely operated. 20% time? Google Labs? Hugely popular Google products scrapped into oblivion.
The only products that matter beyond search are - Android, Google+, YouTube and Google Apps which are fairly mature by now and are a serious threat to competitors.
The thing is they didn't need to do it because they aren't starving of computing resources for more important products and the marginal costs of adding free users is almost nil (although it exists).
I somehow feel betrayed by this decision. Google, so far, has resisted the temptation to shut down products that were important to it's users unlike other companies like Microsoft and Yahoo! I have been using Google Apps since they launched it a long ago. It feels like bait and switch.
This is completely right and there is nothing wrong with them shutting down a free service as a business but somehow it feels so non-Googly.
Google is all good but I feel I should not put all of my emails in one account..
And, if you'd rather run your own server, you can of course just buy their software. But I don't have any experience running that.
Their strategy is to grow the web. This works because they make more money from the web being used. It also makes people love Google, which is important because switching search engines is easy. The love also helps in hiring.
However... they have introduced internal cost accounting, so that products must pay their way - a little internal market. IMHO, this is potentially dangerous, since there already is a market (the real one), and it ignores the advantages of a firm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm) But they don't follow it absolutely, e.g. android isn't paying its way. (NB: Apple is focussed on making better products, not on growing the web).
If google can see that other firms are better placed to do a better job of growing the web in some respect (or they can apply pressure on them to do so), they are happy to step aside.
Not to mention that I cringed throughout this announcement. They are doing it because it benefits users? C'mon, just tell us you love the money, nothing wrong with that.
If you run a business and need the Google Apps platform, then $50 a year really shouldn't be a barrier for you. If it is, time to rethink your business priorities.
Now, the median salary for thos 100 employees is most likely at least $3000, so you are paying them collectively $300,000 a month. That represents 0.016% of their salary. Do you get where I'm going with this?
I give it six months before they start strong-arming free users into paid accounts.
Note that per user limits continue to apply, so people have as much incentive as they ever did to upgrade, plus for any new domains/projects people will naturally either migrate to other options (then consolidate services around these, moving themselves off Google) or start paying.
Not convinced there's any need for hostility on either side.
It's certainly not worth $50 per year because the little ones get maybe 1 email a month from grandma. Since Google does not allow kids on gmail, where should families go now?
Don't see much of a problem here - I'm surprised they didn't do this sooner - I'm happy to pay for this service at that price - no problem.
They also include minimal web hosting with registration too, but last I looked their (free) offering was so bad it didn't really count as a feature.
I imagine some other domain registrars have similar options.
It's sad that now attaching a custom domain will cost a lot more than the domain itself.
[1] - https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine/pVZfdeky-ow...
Now to figure out which email should be 'real' for Google App Engine - maybe the 1 user will be 'noreply'!
Right now, my favorite solution is Kerio Connect, which you can either self-host or purchase as a cloud solution. There are hosting providers who will handle all of this for you, but having the option to bring mail fully in house is really nice.
It's essentially Exchange, but much easier to manage, and far cheaper.
They also have a Sharepoint/Box alternative, Workspace, that I now love.
I'm more than happy paying $555 for a server and then $45/user for license, $15/user/year maintenance, and hosting costs. I really don't think $50-100/mo/user (once you factor in admin/hosting costs...you could do it for $20-30/mo but $50-100 is a safer budget) is an unreasonable amount for top quality email and collaboration tools.
1. Google: can focus on customer service, 2. Google's share holders: more revenue, 3. Competitors: more competitive advantages, 4. Startups: time to disrupt, 5. Users: Email should be decentralized, why rely on a single provider is a good thing?
...yet you are not prepared to pay financially in exchange for that value, and even convey disappointment when the free provision of that value is ceased.
blowing your comment out of context, but this misalignment with value and $ spend is a huge problem in our industry today.
Likely to be disabled very soon.
There was an excellent post about this a while ago, where a developer reported much better treatment from users after charging a token fee for their app.
As a final thought, maybe Google is catching on to the 'charge what something is worth, not what it costs you' way of thinking. Hosted email solutions for enterprise aren't free, and it seems like Google has realized the real value of their product. Also, ~$4/seat/month is pretty well in line with this kind of SaaS offering.
And Google Apps was actually quite easy to setup, partly because Google documented it pretty well but mostly because many DNS providers would basically do a one-click Google Apps setup automatically for you.
I use Google Apps for a small blog that I run and I gave out email addresses to all of the writers. Eventually we had 11 writers and they only allow 10 free so I upgraded that one. People can't do that now. It's either all or nothing.
Meh, their loss. May have to go with Microsoft's alternative or something.
I migrated off Google a year ago to my own server, took a day to sit down and understand/configure it and have since then run smoothly w/o me touching it. And since I host some other people's domains and mail for a small fee, I actually earn a few $ / year.
And now they can't upsell those businesses to paid accounts anymore. Established businesses already have email in place, and switching them over will be a hell of a sell.
The first group—small businesses—can of course afford $50/user/year, even if they would rather not spend it.
The second group—enthusiasts—even if they could afford it, likely cannot justify $50/user/year. I personally have a custom email hosted by Google for a small group of my friends, and I know that there is NO WAY any of us would pay $50 each per year. The price would need to be an order of magnitude lower for us to consider it. (Yes, I know that for the moment we're grandfathered in.)
Seems like there should be a way for Google to distinguish between the two groups based on services needed and then price two tiers accordingly. For example, offer a Small Group Plan at $5/user/year with a limit of 10 users & no phone support; and another Small Business Plan that offers up to 50 users, limited phone support & whatever else help small businesses for a higher price.
Personally, I liked the direction Google was heading with their Google Drive product. You get up to 5GB for free and then pay for more if you need it. Makes me wonder how Google might try to monetize other products like Google+ once they have a substantial following.
At the very least there will be less potential customers now. I imagine some people would have been willing to pay $0 to Google and $15 per user per month for some kind of project management offering, now it's $65 per month, which is really going to hurt new sign ups.
Also for anyone with an existing free account who wants to add new domains, don't forget you can add domain alias's. So you keep the same account but just make it so email from two+ different domains can come in. For tiny ideas that always have the same 1-2 employees it's almost preferable to a whole new account anyway.
That in and of itself is worth a huge amount of money.
3 way email sync (mobile/web/desktop) like exchange server (or other enterprise stuff)
A slick feature rich UI
Custom domains via MX
Solid spam filtering
There is nothing out there that does this for under 10$/month per user and I think there is a solid market for a better price point.
> There is nothing out there that does this for under 10$/month per user and I think there is a solid market for a better price point.
Then again, being forced to find my own email hosting would have made me less dependent on Google, which may have been a good thing...
I, for one, would sure want to Keep all my chat contacts to some other service than Google/Gmail, Calendar with an independent provider. Unfortunately, unlike Calendar and some other services services like SNS and Chat are dependent upon what and where your other friends are. I would love it if I can have my own chat setup and I can chat with my friends on GTalk and Facebook (no, I don't personally know anyone who uses Yahoo any more or used other services like AIM ever at all).
Now Facebook, of course, is another story. My impression is that they use a technology based on Jabber but not compatible with anything outside of Facebook. I could be wrong--I simply never use Facebook chat.
All our customers are small businesses (photographers, designers) and usually just make 1 to 3 mailboxes.
Any alternative out there?
If you use google apps already, nothing changes (if I'm reading this correctly?)
If you're thinking about using google apps, you've got to pay for it now.
Yes, this benefits no one but google. Then again, google has been providing benefit to millions of people with google apps. Running your own e-mail server is not trivial. There's a reason there are no good gmail alternatives--it's harder than it looks.
If I were them, I would have charged for it from the beginning--it's a really useful service. And they could have been real dicks by forcing all current free users to start coughing up dough.
Still, the huge amount of spam that's been getting through (10-15 per day, despite always logging in to the gmail web interface and clicking Report Spam) has been encouraging me to consider a move anyway. This change is just the nudge I needed to finally make it happen...
Forwarders in cPanel simply copy all incoming mail to email@mydomain to myother@email. If I didn't already create an email account email@mydomain, the incoming mail WILL NOT be stored on server which makes this a feasible solution. If I had, incoming mail would be copied to myother@email.
Having to spend $400 on my email (or spend a lot of time either switching or combining mail accounts) every year would be hell.
This is also means that probably less and less of online services will be free.
Of course, you will still have "Walmarts of the online services" but you will get what you pay for - nothing more.
And I don't think there will be "cheaper" alternatives: but I do expect emergence of more expensive and better alternatives (if you can fork $50/year than you can fork $100/year - free is different story).
Namecheap offers custom domain email hosting for $2.99/user/year. 3GB storage. Supports IMAP. 50MB attachment limit. No ads. No clue on the web interface quality, nor spam-filtering quality, but it's definitely a good price from a good company.
It sucks that they've removed the free version; it's definitely a step up from managing multiple individual gmail accounts or creating a shared account of some sort. (I use one for one of the side jobs I do; it's a pain in the ass.)
However, $50/year for premium is really friggin good, considering that the cheapest alternative is $10/mo ($100/yr) for hosted Exchange 2010 alone.
Totally taking this as a sign for my next app btw.
I'm not liking the direction they're going as I use all of the above frequently (including signing up new domains for GApps regularly). It always comes down to money at the end of the day.
EDIT: https://www.zoho.com/mail looks pretty good, too, and is the least expensive of the pack.
I'm seriously considering starting such a service.
This is important though. DO NOT TRY THE FREE TRIAL UNLESS YOU PLAN ON STICKING WITH IT.
After yesterday, even if you have a legacy free account, you give up that privilege if you try the free 30 days. See here:
If you own your own block C or larger this may not apply, but if you are renting servers or using a colo there is woe to be had.
Buy one user account - set up a ton of aliases. Set up filters to Gmail inboxes.
Yeah, that feels dirty... I know.
(Google may charge you to use this feature.)
Also, when you attempt to sign up, the link redirects to a google apps free trial page.
DAMNIT
I was literally 10 minutes away from signing up.
http://googleappsupdates.blogspot.com/2012/12/changes-to-goo...
For everyone with an account, I suggest looking for an alternative soon.