Month: February 2022

Those of us who signed up for a free Google Apps account back in 2006 or thereabouts just got hit with a sledgehammer from the organisation – pay up by July or lose your data. Although signing up for the free option was dropped in 2012 many IT-savvy people had set up family groups with custom domains by that point and have relied on the service since then. The short notice and possible relatively high cost (6€ per user per month) for the transition hasn’t gone down at all well, and remember that’s with a by now possibly influential group of people.

When originally offered there was a statement that the service would continue to be free, but with the proviso that would only apply as long as Google continued to offer the service. I’m assuming there’s been sufficient change here to make dropping it legal, so I’ll let others argue that point. Suffice it to say that I still think this is a bit of an underhand move to save probably very little actual operational costs, and something that won’t generate enough revenue to recover the bad feeling engendered by the move.

Disclaimer – I’m one of those hit by the announcement, and I’m not particularly overjoyed with it. Although not amongst the worst-hit (those who have used the accounts to purchase apps or media, or use the Google account to authenticate sign-ins elsewhere are really going to feel the pain) I either need to pony up for multiple accounts or find somewhere to migrate everything to.

That’s a lot of email, all nicely sorted and labelled, that’s going to have to move, unless the behemoth comes up with an alternative. There are murmurings of movement on the matter, in response to much disquiet and outright outrage, but nothing concrete has emerged yet. Will this be a climbdown (very unlikely – they’ve made their intentions clear) or more possibly provision of a lower cost alternative that retains the rights and privileges ensconced in the current provision? Don’t know yet, but it’s going to have to be competitive with the possible alternatives: a family Office365 account (ugh – GoDaddy domain registration required!), Zoho email, or my current favoured option – iCloud+ with the newish custom domain facility. The latter is looking very attractive if Google fails to make any move, given that the costs are already covered by my iCloud subscription.

BTW, Google will also lose my YouTube monthly subscription if they go ahead with this – it’s been nice, but no way will I continue to support a company that just drops such an important facility with so little recognition or planning, Do no evil, huh.