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Comment by chrisblackwell | Hacker News Reader

This is really a logical step. If you are an individual and don't really see the value in $50 a year, you can forward your own domain to your regular Gmail account and set the reply to email address to whatever you want.

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.

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$50 / user / year - still not insane but I know it's put people off in the past.

We have a Google Apps account at my day gig with 79 users; I pay it monthly on a credit card, at $5/month, so right around $400/month. That is incredible value for what we get with Google Apps, as they don't just do our email, calendar, etc, but also Drive and our authentication (via OAuth/LDAP).

Certainly puts me off. $5/10 per user per year, wouldn't think twice about it (even though the money would be paid grudgingly). With the number of users we have that would end up being around $50/year; but $500/year to host some email and store spreadsheets? No thanks.

Let's imagine your company has 100 employees in it. So at $5/user a month, you are paying $500 a month.

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?

And when the median salary of your employees is $0/month (prototyping or a family domain or something) and your options are: a. Nothing b. $50/(employee/family member)

What then? Of course no company paying $300,000/month is going to care about $50/user/year.

Edit: Clarification

You're off by an order of magnitude. There's also a shorter way to compute percentages since (5x100)/(3000x100) = 5/3000

5/3000 = 0.16%.

And you don't need to forward. You can access it with IMAP within Gmail.

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