My worst tech decision: A G Suite account for personal use (opens in new tab)

Yes. I made the mistake of setting up Google Home with my “Google Apps for Your Domain” account I used since around 2009. Now I’m married and can’t add my wife. It’s been years and no changes: it still doesn’t work.

Not mentioned: paying customers getting randomly banned and losing some or all of their Google account and primary email. Also the whole email scraping thing.

I will never use a Google service as a mission critical part of my life ever again because of all this, they just have no interest in customers.

Huh, I've been using G Suite with Google Pay (well it's Wallet as of last week) for a year now, but the author reports they can't. Is Indian Google Pay a different service to European Google Pay?

Even internally at Google, a large number of employees are stuck in this situation and have pushed for it to be fixed for years, but AFAIK they are no closer to actually getting anything fixed.

Have a grandfathered 'free' family gSuite- luckily I personally use a regular gmail account for 99%, but for family members who standardized on the gSuite account, it has significant limitations- for instance I can't add them to my YouTube family premium account.

Slowly migrating everyone off of it and just keeping it for single email address list distribution for family emails.

Leaving is quite difficult, too

I had a very, very hard time getting them to forget about my domain so that it would work elsewhere

I have an old "Apps for Domains" account and used an email address from it to sign up for Nest years ago. When everyone's home security cams were getting hacked due to password re-use Google tried to force everyone to use a gmail account for auth. It sounded like a good idea. Every time I'd open the app it'd spam me with a notification asking me to use Google auth instead of a username and password. I'd try, but every time I'd get a cryptic error back. Turns out they don't support Apps/GSuite/Workspace accounts at all. That didn't stop them from spamming me for months, however.

I'm glad I never got enticed by getting a paid account like that. Everything just works for me.

I have multiple G Suite accounts for business, and a @gmail.com account for everything else. All personal and subscribed and Google paid services (like Youtube Premium) go to the @gmail account. If/when I move the domains elsewhere, I still have my "tied to Google consumer services" account separated. I realized this was probably the way to go back when their chat and "Google Family" services wouldn't map to G Suite accounts.

I would like to, and plan to, leave, but for now, this is the better way.

It's definitely not a perfect solution, but one approach could have been for the author to use a consumer Gmail account and to have set up the gsuite account as an alias.

Swpapped my G suite custom domain accounts for mailcow and never looked back. Luckily I never used these accounts for paid apps or other Google specific services.

Anything not related to Gmail (like Pay) is able to migrate to normal Google account (though it could be annoying). Multiple account is supported well on both web and Android. Google Home is real pain because it relies on every information Google have, including Gmail on my domain.

This is one of the main reasons I moved all critically important services (Government accounts, banking) to a different email provider. I should really do the same for SSO with Google account, but damn it's convenient...

Everybody who knows anything about the Google infrastructure burned out and quit less than two years after getting a job there. So nobody know how anything works. Google can't prove me wrong.

Watch any of the 'a day in the life of a Google engineer' videos on youtube and it's clear why things like this happen.

Very little work is done there.

Same story here. I moved to Fastmail a few years ago and have no regrets. I’ll never use another Google service.