Enlarge / An artist’s rendering of Google’s current reputation. (credit: Aurich Lawson)
Google says the free ride is over for early users of the company’s custom domain G Suite service. Google has long offered a service that lets you use Google apps on a custom domain, allowing you to have a Google email that ends in your domain instead of “gmail.com.” Today, you have to pay for the privilege of a custom domain with a Google account, but for the first six years of the service’s life, the basic tier allowed you to create a custom domain account for free. Google turned off the ability to create these accounts for free in 2012, but it wouldn’t take away accounts from existing users, would it?
Google will. As 9to5Google was the first to report, Google is going to shut down free G Suite accounts if the users don’t transition to a paid account. Google is sending out emails to users of “G Suite legacy free edition” accounts, telling them they have until July 1 to start paying. A support page is up detailing how this is going to work. Starting May 1, Google will try to automatically “upgrade” users to a paid account if it has available billing information. If there is no such information by July, accounts will be “suspended.” After 60 days, those accounts will lose access to “core” Google services like Gmail and Calendar.
Google’s custom domain started in 2006 as “Google Apps for Your Domain.” It’s been through a million name changes since then—”Google Apps for Work,” then “G Suite,” and now “Google Workspace”—but the outcome has all been the same: you get Gmail and other Google apps, but they’ve been custom branded for your company, giving them a more professional appearance than a gmail.com email address. Today, the service starts at $6 per user, per month, with higher tiers available for higher storage needs. From 2006 to 2012, the basic tier was free.
Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
