Hacker News Reader

Comment by codev | Hacker News Reader

I had a similar situation where I switched a 50 person charity to Google Apps. They had a 30 day trial period and during that time the CEO's credit card was stolen and replaced. I changed the information but the Apps interface said 'No valid payment information stored' so I called their support and they assured me the new card was stored and everything would be fine.

Surprise, surprise on the day the account totally shut down. I called in a panic and after a lot of fiddling about (and reassuring me that they had recorded that I thought there might be a problem) they got it back up with everyone's mail after almost a whole day of downtime.

To add insult to injury Google don't run a charity program in the UK despite the non-profit laws being a lot stricter than the US and it being easy to validate a charity - so they're paying full rate for Google Apps for Business.

View on HN

That last part is not entirely accurate. I did some IT volunteer work for a charity very recently, and they definitely had a free Google Apps for Business setup. This is in addition to a reasonably generous grant in the form of AdWords credit.

Google Apps for Nonprofits page states it's only available in the US:

https://support.google.com/nonprofits/answer/1614602?hl=en&t...

If you could ask someone involved in that charity how they got free Google Apps I'd appreciate it as I work for a number of charities and the costs of Google Apps are a significant admin overhead. I've tried calling the sales people and they say it's coming soon but they've been saying that for over 5 years now.

Would you have any idea who we're able to contact about this? I'm involved in a registered UK charity and we were looking to use Google Apps before, but can't justify the monthly cost of $5 per account.

Thanks!

Sorry for the misleading information, chaps.

I asked the organisation, and found out that it's not an official programme in the UK. The only one they have here is Google Grants for AdWords - http://www.google.co.uk/grants/.

Basically, an enterprising IT volunteer had set them up with vanilla Google Apps back when it was still free for small business and had a 50 user limit, and they just got grandfathered in to the new Apps for Business. They've never had any problems with the user or space limit since they just use the setup for email, analytics and AdWords campaigns and only have about 4-6 people "working" there.

Apologies again.

Ah. The offering used to be called Google Apps for Domains back when users could still sign up for free 100/50/10-user-limit accounts. Google Apps for Business, in some of our minds, is the post-December 2012 paid service.

Here's a link comparing the free edition with Google Apps for Business: http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=17512...

Thanks for getting back to us though!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com