undefined | Better HN

0 pointsmichaelmrose4y ago0 comments

It was free for 10 accounts. The number one massively applicable use case vs plain google accounts was vanity domain names and signing up was no harder than creating a regular gmail account. There are probably more vanity domain users than small businesses with 10 people. In fact I would venture to guess with the 10 address limit they are nearly 100% of the remaining users on the legacy program.

The cost of the domain name is $10 per domain per year or $1 per person per year little enough for one person to pay without thinking.

Most people keep an email address for a very very long time rarely switching unless a service ceases to exist.

Almost no domain owners are going to pony up $720 per year themselves and collection from other users will be an untenable hassle.

Basically every bullet point you listed is wrong. The remaining pool of users is likely 99% vanity users who would have used Gmail+custom domain forever at no real cost to Google over free Gmail none of which will migrate to Google workspace.

For Google the gain from this change will be identical to picking n random Gmail accounts and canceling them and keeping those users digital purchases as a giant fu.

Not ruinous but hardly profitable either.

Someone with an ounce of sense would have included the option to migrate all email accounts to regular Gmail accounts.

0 comments

9 comments · 3 top-level

ArchOversight4y ago· 5 in thread

It was free for unlimited accounts (I still have a G Suite Legacy account that was grandfathered into that) at first.

Eventually unlimited free accounts was dropped to 50, in 2009 (my grandfathered account was soft-capped at that, with the option to reach out to support to increase it), but I had several other domains that were hard-capped at 50 since I opened them after that limit was instituted. [1]

Then that limit was dropped from 50 to 10 (hard capped, grand-fathered accounts kept their old limits) in 2011. [2]

Then last but not least there was the 1 user free if you had a Google AppEngine project (that came with the requirement that it was tied to a G-Suite at the time).

My G Suite legacy accounts were all created in 2007-2010 timeframe.

[1]: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2009/01/50-user-limi...

[2]: https://cloud.googleblog.com/2011/04/helping-small-businesse...

Aloha4y ago

Have you even gotten an email from them yet on your oldest accounts?

Mine is from '08 and I have heard no official communications from them.

InvaderFizz4y ago

No email here. Mine is from the very early days, pretty much as soon as it became available as Google Apps for Domains. I have a 200 user cap because I requested more than whatever the default was. I have a total of 3 active accounts, everything else is just a forwarder.

I use it as a forwarder to my gmail, but now I have to migrate my parents off their accounts. It will either end up as Gmail or Outlook.com for them. Migrating their email will be annoying.

I maintain a full GSuite Business account for other purposes, so I can use that as my mail relay service.

Thanks to routing rules, they'll continue to receive emails transparently, it will redirect a copy to their new email, as if they were a BCC.

I'll handle the groups the same, only a few and the routing rule can add 100 recipients.

Eventually, once cloudflare email forwarding supports groups, I'll just move to that. It's on their internal roadmap, so maybe it will happen before 2024.

1 more reply

ArchOversight4y ago

I have not received an email, but logging in to the account there's a notice now that tells me about the impending changes.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's finally time to migrate away, I've been putting it off, but so far the accounts I created seem to have mostly become dormant, so only one user has to change, and I'll just re-create them an IMAP account for their mail, they don't use any other services.

filchermcurr4y ago

Mine is also around 2008. No e-mail, nothing in the billing section, and nothing in the dashboard.

henriks4y ago

No communications to my account from '06 either, first read about this here.

y4mi4y ago· 1 in thread

> Basically every bullet point you listed is wrong. The remaining pool of users is likely 99% vanity users who would have used Gmail+custom domain forever at no real cost to Google over free Gmail none of which will migrate to Google workspace.

Why do any of your issues in any way contribute to the decision wherever someone should invest their time to create a migration tool so users can switch from the old legacy product to a free account which doesn't have any of the domain features to begin with?

I get that you're unhappy that Google discontinues their free service for you, but that wasn't what the discussion was about.

michaelmroseOP4y ago

My point was that you listed 3 factors and asserted that the overlap in a venn diagram would have little overlap. In fact the venn diagram ought to look more like a circle.

All users who signed up for google apps at your domain are in A people who initially signed up. People in B are those who haven't switched away. C are those who are unwilling to pay $72 per user per year.

A->B Very few users change email addresses very frequently because we accumulate 100 or even hundreds of pages with signups under a single address, phones set up under our google account, oauth sign ins, apps and games purchased under our google account. Google accounts are much more sticky than regular email accounts and people rarely abandon those. I would venture to guess the list of active accounts in B is most of A.

B->C Very few people who signed up for $10 a year for 10-50 addresses are going to be onboard with paying between $720 and $3600 a year. C includes 99.9% of B.

binkHN4y ago

I agree with everything you posted here! With one exception. The number of accounts, originally, was unlimited—you just needed to request them.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse