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Comment by Steveism | Hacker News Reader

This is unfortunate indeed. The free Google Apps offering was a substantial value. What viable alternatives are there?

"Google Apps offering was a substantial value"

...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.

It's just too goddamned much money for organizations that are small and are not funded startups. $50 per user per year -- if it was $5, they might have a deal, but having to cough up $500 annually for something that was originally free?

Outlook.com has a free service that does precisely the same thing: http://domains.live.com

For small projects, I'll take a look at Namecheap email hosting, from $2.99/year:

http://www.namecheap.com/email/email-hosting.aspx

I am already using this for my security email address (the one that I use to secure other security doors). It's good. I think I could use it more at a even at some more cost, maybe even for my other emails, iff they better their web interface.

Seems most of the people recommending alternatives are only thinking of email. I use gapps for my family, and we take a huge advantage of having a domain-specific calender and docs.

Chat is another service that is being ignored here.Which needs the other party to be using it.

What is the advantage of using domain-specific calendar/docs over using them with your personal google account?

The mom or dad can do stuff like restrict who the kid is allowed to chat or share documents with.

It's a lot easier to have your data be shared with the whole team. Otherwise, with a personal google account, sharing a document with a team requires adding each individual person to each document. There appears to be a feature of adding a group to a document, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to define groups, and even if it were possible it'd be a few extra steps to manage as well as to keep track of, since the document overview only shows "shared" but not the people/group it's shared with.

With a domain-specific account, it's easy to set a document to be shared with the group - added benefit is if you add a new user to the domain, she is automatically given access to those documents. Also, the document overview is much easier to manage since anything marked "shared" usually means teamwide.

I get what you're saying, everything can be accomplished with the still free personal google account, just it includes a constant daily drain on mental processing power.

Rackspace has Hosted email for 2 dollars per month per user. but then there is also a 10 dollar a month minimum.

For free? Probably nothing.

How about alternatives between free and $50/user a year?

I'm thinking nothing if you require things like Google Apps instead of just Gmail. If you're talking about a "Gmail for your Domain" alternative, just look to other email providers:

https://www.fastmail.fm/

http://pobox.com/

http://www.gandi.net (includes some amount of email w/ domain registration)

You could pay for it?

Well, obviously yes I could and so could my clients. But Free is the best kind of price, especially for startups. I have no problem paying for good software and services. I also have no problem seeking out the next option that compares in value. At this point Google Apps is a paid email option that must compete with all the other countless premium email options.

If a dollar a week is too much for what you get from this service then maybe you're doing something wrong, especially for startups where you're not going to have hundreds of employees.

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