Not exactly the same as normal Gmail, this option lets you keep using a custom domain at $0/month, which basic Gmail doesn't offer. To me it's 100% worth it as that was my main concern (with so many accounts bound to my domain email).
>I do in fact though still have my google voice on my personal no-cost accounts still working. Logging into each account and going directly to http://voice.google.com
>
>*this seems to work with already established voice accounts, and new ones cant be made for account on suite legacy anymore.
Perhaps Google just wanted to scare businesses on the legacy plan into migrating to the paid service, expecting that those who could afford to pay wouldn't leave it to the last minute.
I think they're pretty justified to block additional uploads for any over their stated (but poorly enforced) quota, and give a window for users to get back under quota then just delete it for the obvious bad actors.
G Suite legacy accounts have always been limited to 15GB, and my newsletter inbox has been barred once from receiving further email because I'm always close to the limit.
Given how long it took and their original apathy to the negative reaction, I’m guessing a large percentage of users were migrating away rather than paying to upgrade.
I transitioned to fastmail for e-mail and am happy I did. I really like google docs and google sheets, but I'm moving off of google drive for everything else and just using syncthing.
Same. I recently moved to iOS and I found the Gmail app to be pretty buggy. Staring emails worked about 50% of the time, scrolling in HTML emails was very janky, clicking on a notification and reading an email didn't mark the email as read. This plus the Gsuite transition pushed me to Fastmail. I now use that plus the native iOS mail app and I have no complaints.
Just moved my legacy plan over to the 'new' personal use/free plan and it seems fine. Good grief how this wasn't the plan from the very start is just beyond me. I hope the complete trashing of trust and perception with the earliest and most tech connected users was worth it, Google.
What changed? Does it put an additional limit on users or are you still able to add as you were before (up to your existing limit)?
Maybe this really was supposed to be some sort of "shock" to push a certain group over to google's paid services. Or maybe it was just a mismanaged mess.
I don't have any extra users, other than like a few oauth app keys for random integrations. I just use it for my personal gmail and custom domain, and (unfortunately) all of my Android purchase history over a decade plus of mobile phone usage. Everything seems to be working just as before.
yeah, theory 1 was they thought they could get some money out of pushing users to Workspace and didn't get the conversion rate they hoped for.
Theory 2 is they really were developing a GSuite to Google Account migrator and it ended up being way too messy to be workable in the deadline they set themselves.
Is there a link to official info on what the new personal use plan entails?
Edit: There's this summary, but nothing detailed so far:
Continue using your custom domain with Gmail
Keep using Gmail with your custom domain
Retain access to no-cost Google services
You will retain access to the no-cost version of Google Workspace services such as Google Drive and Google Meet, and additional Google services such as Google Search, Google Maps, and YouTube
Keep your purchases and data
You will retain access to paid content such as movie purchases at Google Play and data stored on Google Workspace
This option is for non-commercial personal use
Google may remove business functionality from this offering and transition businesses to Google Workspace. Additionally, this option will not include support.
Load of my shoulders. As much as I hate to be beholden to Google, both my parents (in their 70s) use our gsuit account with custom domain and migrating them to a different service was … well, you know how it goes. The cost was a bit much.
Yeah, similar situation here. And yes, trying to explain to others how to use a new email system would probably have been more expensive than just paying but FFS, Google, way to freak out a bunch of kids who have had to be the family IT admin.
This situation sort-of landed in my lap. My older brother set up custom domain email with the family surname for himself, parents, and another sibling many years ago, but he died a couple of years ago, and as the only other techy person in the family, I've kind of taken on responsibility for these things, even though I don't use it myself. I was putting off migrating to another service, so I'm glad I don't have to worry about it anymore. (I was going to go with Apple iCloud+ because they're all pretty invested in Apple stuff anyway, but the process of manually transfering each person's email archive with Google Takeout was a bit of an unknown for me.)
Thanks for the unnecessary anxiety Google! I wish I could get back the wasted brain cycles spent contemplating how the fuck I was going to transition my family to something else.
You probably should still transition your family to something else. Google is not gonna stop being Google because they got a ton of pushback for
this stunt.
Well, I already moved my custom domain email over to fastmail.
Been meaning to for a while anyway... I'd rather pay them a few bucks than keep having Google do whatever it was they were doing with my email (maybe nothing all that bad, but who the hell knows?)
I did the same but was already a Fastmail customer. Didn't even realize you could add additional domains to an existing account without any additional charge. Great service!
Why would they arbitrarily limit this to 2022? I converted my account a while back because I had to in order to get more storage, but now I'm punished for giving them money for a year or two? Google is so bad at this!
You don't need to get in actual contact with support. It's not clear from the linked page, but when you go to the (?) icon on your admin page there's an automated click-through flow to revert to legacy - I just did it for my account.
What did you transition to? I recently made an exploratory protonmail account to move my personal domain to but found that their handling of arbitrary mailboxes like the +suffixes is not useful since you have to register each one, are limited in number, and can’t send from them.
I'm really happy they waited until I finished the transition and deleted my account. Otherwise laziness might have kept me from moving and it really was the right choice.
(I went to Fastmail and have been mostly happy so far)
Especially with Google, they have the sort of high level decision making that is only sustainable if you are constantly drowning in cash. You need to give them a little time to come to their senses. Let the bad PR soak in a bit and work its way up the reporting chain.
This is a relief. I might still move some of my personal domains off of GSuite, but the fact that I don't have to is honestly a real relief.
And I wouldn't even mind paying. If you wanted to charge me just for email without any of the other stuff and not offer support, I'd pay $100 a year if you could give me unlimited (or even 25 or whatever the original number of email addresses was) separate inboxes. But when you insist on charging me $5 or $6 a month per address and domain (which for my completely personal use case would be $24 a month), and I'm not ever going to use any of the other stuff -- then I get annoyed. Especially since I could have just set up an alias on a free account, years later, when that became an option.
I understand these types of plans keep getting shut down because businesses or spammers or moochers abuse them, I do. But a personal/family targeted plan for hosted email with a custom domain should be something someone can offer that doesn't charge people $25 or $30 a month.
I seriously doubt GSuite legacy was a huge spam vector. You still have to send mail through Google's gmail infrastructure and be beholden to all the spam, abuse, etc. mitigations in place there. GCE is probably a bigger source of spam with people spinning up a VM, cranking out millions of SMTP requests, and dipping out.
Well, it wasn't just Google. Microsoft cut out the free custom email domain for OneDrive, Zoho cut theirs way down -- so my feeling is that it had to have been abused in some way, even if it wasn't strictly spam.
That's the thing though... it doesn't need to be free, it can have some cost - just not $6 per user per month. That's difficult to justify for fun/vanity/family email addresses.
$6 monthly with unlimited (or some high number) of family member users would be fine.
Yeah, there’s been mixed success on the custom domain part of that I think, otherwise I would have moved long ago because I get Office for $20 a year (former Microsoft employee), but I’ll definitely look into that.
I’m happy to pay. I’m not willing to pay $25 - $30 a month for basic email just because I want separate inboxes and a custom domain.
The custom domain option is only available for those who use GoDaddy as their registrar (which is not an option I'm willing to consider), plus they imply only the free domains (outlook.com, hotmail.com, msn.com, etc) get attachment screening, and email encryption.
I agree. And given that it's legacy, surely you can just weed out the abusers and leave the legitimate users that signed up when you promised it was free?
Yeah this has been insanity. Really poor communication and rollout -- I swear I was one of the last to get notifications within email/admin.
I'd gladly pay for the personal service if it wasn't per-user.
Though, I'm sure google got a lot of value out of this. I switched myself and many others onto gsuite early on. It was some of their first introductions to the "google apps" that have now become the structure for their "Workspace".
The fact that such poor communication and process can come from a giant employing so many clever people really makes me wonder. Is it more likely to be incompetence or intentional?
I have a few domains aliased to my main one on GSuite Legacy, with aliased email for friends and family that I brought in with the understanding that it was always free. And now I have to shoulder monthly costs for these people. Or push them out and be doing tech support to help them set up elsewhere.
This is great news for those folks that already were on the GSuite Legacy plan... but it's of zero help for folks looking to set something like this up now for personal reasons.
I own my last name as a domain, and always thought it would be fun to use it for my primary email as firstname@lastname.com. Well... $6 a month for an individual "vanity" email address is already hard enough to justify once you realize Workspaces doesn't give you a "real" gmail account (google assistant, google one, etc... meaning you still need to maintain another gmail address, defeating the point), and then once you have 2, 3, 6 family members also wanting a vanity email address, the cost is just insane.
How is this not something anyone at Google have thought of? Gmail or use business accounts that come with a ton of strings attached.
You can easily get hosting for ~$20/yr from classic web hosts like Hostineer and just set up email forwarding to people's personal Gmail and get the same functionality with a little bit more control and flexibility on your part.
Ya, aliasing is certainly not a replacement - particularly for non-tech savvy family members.
I've also been around long enough to know not to try running my own email server anymore... been there, done that (Zimbra & Exchange). While possible, it will consume more of your time than you want.
It's just beyond me why the likes of Google and Microsoft have not come up with a Family plan for bringing your own domain name... one that doesn't cost $5-6+ per month per user.
I understand, but forwarding in my experience is brittle and rife with it's own problems.
The point of paying an email service is to make me not have to worry about it anymore. Gmail is free, and Workspace is $6 per user, Fastmail is $5 per user, etc.
If I'm anywhere near $20 monthly, I'd rather pay it to someone to have proper email and no "hacks". I just think it's absurd there is no "family & personal" option for any of these services... particularly Google where they could hoover up everyone's inbox like they already do in Gmail, plus make a few bucks monthly for the privilege of allowing me to use my own domain name.
That's literally all everyone wants here... GMail + Custom Domain Name. Google One should have this an a paid option and support X number of other users you can invite (family members with their own Gmail accounts). Families don't need retention policies, GDPR accreditation, etc.
I don't think you should conflate those two things. I've run GSuite for a number of vanity domains since they started offering it way back when and have always had my actual Google account tied to my OG Gmail ([name]@gmail.com). In this way I don't have to worry about dealing with a split-horizon type situation if I ever decide to pull those vanity domains down and move them elsewhere. That and I don't trust Google to not do something evil (intentional or otherwise). I don't want to be in a situation where I'm locked out of things I paid for or payment accounts AND be locked out of the vanity domain(s) email.
The other nice side effect is I only use my gmail.com address for Google account related things. I don't get personal email there anymore and that inbox is pristine which is impressive since I've had it since Gmail launched.
My GSuite account, on the other hand, is quite a dumpster fire from years of personal email, aliases, and adding in other domains from time to time. Part of me would just like to walk away from it but too many things are tied to a number of email addresses in those domains.
I really do prefer Fastmail at this point, but I don't want to move these particular domains given how much junk gets sent to those addresses.
But... I wouldn't suggest using a vanity address as a primary Google account. Managing the two is worth the overhead and risk avoidance.
You might be interested in Migadu or MXRoute. They both offer email hosting but billing is based on total storage and sent messages instead of per user, which makes it feasible for things like family vanity addresses.
Yah, I totally agree. As I said, I’m willing to pay. I’ll even pay $100 a year. Shoot, $150 if you want to include some cloud storage I won’t touch because I hate how Google Drive works. But $25-$30 a month, is just obscene for this sort of thing. Because I’m not a business. I’m an individual who would like my own domain name, the same way I’ve been using my own domain names since I was 14 years old.
If in 2007 or 2008, Google had positioned this as a business product (and they didn’t. It was literally called Google Apps For Your Domain, promoted as a free service, and people were told to sign up their families or use it for their websites to get all the benefits of Gmail (which was and remains free) but on your own domain), that would be one thing. If in 2012 when they made it a legacy service, they’d told us, you can continue to pay but it’ll be “$X per domain and you won’t get any of these extra business features,” that would have been fine.
If in February or March or whenever this was announced, they had said, “if you want to convert this to a personal Gmail account that has aliasing setup” or you want to again, pay per domain (not per account) and not get certain Workspace features and zero support, that would have been fine.
Instead, we were told a bunch of conflicting things, we were encouraged to upgrade to accounts we didn’t need or to migrate to other providers, or those of us procrastinators (me) held out some hope we’d get a solution like we got. And I’m genuinely thankful for that decision.
But I still agree that there is a market — maybe not a huge one, but a market, for hosted email on a custom domain aimed at individuals and families that doesn’t charge per address.
I’m sure you would risk cannibalizing some business sales for people who would want to be cheap and claim to be a family, but businesses too cheap to pay for email accounts usually just use regular gmail accounts anyway. And with the right restrictions (on number of accounts and of message volume sent), I think you could still have a profitable endeavor. At least I’d like to think so.
> But I still agree that there is a market — maybe not a huge one, but a market, for hosted email on a custom domain aimed at individuals and families that doesn’t charge per address.
Migadu, MXroute, or one other which is a YC company that I fail to remember the name of (ImprovMX I think?).
I have an Mxroute account. And I like them a lot. Very good people. But it’s a small scrappy operation that I don’t put in the same tier as a Fastmail or a Gmail. For its price, it doesn’t really need to be, but I’ve also had downtime (totally understandable), and it didn’t solve the ancillary problems of any accounts I’ve created with those Google Apps for Your Domain SAML/SSO. Which Google claims would/could still work, but would still require a lot of auditing on my part that I’m frankly happy to avoid.
Cloudflare’s email forwarding was also a consideration. I prefer having separate actual inboxes, but I could create new gmail or Outlook accounts to forward to. I may use that for a new family homelab project, where my husband doesn’t want to monitor a new inbox.
I mean, I’m not relying on them. But this is at least a few more months of me not having to consolidate to single inboxes, to a different platform, or to have to pay $24 a month for low-volume personal email accounts that I dared to want a custom domain name for.
based on their turnaround on this and willingness to reconsider support for the legion of free users who want to stay in the ecosystem and already have tons of stuff stored (this isn't just about email. photos and files are a huge deal.), it seems you can rely on them somewhat still.
That's definitely within a reasonable deletion windowpz but also maybe up against the edge of it - try yelling really loudly (tweet @AskWorkspace, ask contacts/friends, etc, basically move now) and you very well might be able to get it back.
(I see there's an email address at the bottom of the link in your bio FWIW, just in case someone might consider reaching out that way)
I had been holding off out of laziness but all this does is give me more time before I transition to fastmail as well. Google is not offering any assurances they won't do something similar in the future. And renegging on the free tier I simply use for email has left a bad taste.
Quick and painless. I don't notice any immediate difference, but I only use the core features really. Clicked the button and it came back with the following text and that was it:
>You have chosen to continue using the Free Legacy Edition of G Suite for personal use.
>If you change your mind and want access to premium features, you can take advantage of a special discount by upgrading your subscription in the Google Admin Console.
What a self inflicted mess though since this is what should have been announced in the first place.
I am with you on this.I have disabled all features (including Gmail) and migrated my family to self hosting, but you need a Google account/identity when invited to some online webinars, for Android phone (unless you want to jump through huge hoops and use Aurora store, but some apps might still not work (banking...)). Unfortunately.
I transitioned my family domain name to a small nonprofit that I created to do donations. If you have such an entity, it's an easy way to opt out of this whole problem. I realize this doesn't apply to most people, but I'm just putting it here as an alternative.
> I transitioned my family domain name to a small nonprofit that I created to do donations. If you have such an entity, it's an easy way to opt out of this whole problem.
Unless your family has a foundation that's planning to give grants, this sounds like an abuse of Google's goodwill towards nonprofits.
Also quite possibly not a legal purpose for a nonprofit. There are different sorts of US non-profits, state (various) and federal, and I'm not sure which ones Google means to accept, but "providing email services to one family" is not a valid purpose for many of them.
If it's a 501-c-3, "sending donations to whatever my family wants to" may also not be valid, and may be considered a tax dodge.
What a fucking mess. You make the whole world panic, your migration tools are not ready, and then you say "actually, just kidding" and tell everyone who believed what you said that you would delete their accounts (because you basically said their accounts would be deleted), to "contact support".
It's an overused trope, but this was so poorly planned, executed, and communicated and it can only be explained by decision makers actually being on drugs.
If you had any illusions about how Google feels about users this seems to clear it up. Would have transitioned, but I moved away when they announced it as many others did.
188 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 229 ms ] threadThe catch is, as soon as you migrate you will lose your gvoice number, since that is not included in the "all free services will be migrated".
And then it will be too late to research alternatives as you lost your number and will start paying (and then realize your old number is long gone :)
https://support.google.com/voice/answer/12083094?hl=en&ref_t... See the section titled: “Transfer to another Google Account (ends in @gmail.com)”
>I do in fact though still have my google voice on my personal no-cost accounts still working. Logging into each account and going directly to http://voice.google.com
>
>*this seems to work with already established voice accounts, and new ones cant be made for account on suite legacy anymore.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuitelegacymigration/comments/ur3h...
And now I’m curious what that number is.
Funny how some (arguably futile) memories stick in.
Maybe this really was supposed to be some sort of "shock" to push a certain group over to google's paid services. Or maybe it was just a mismanaged mess.
Theory 2 is they really were developing a GSuite to Google Account migrator and it ended up being way too messy to be workable in the deadline they set themselves.
Edit: There's this summary, but nothing detailed so far:
Continue using your custom domain with Gmail
Keep using Gmail with your custom domain
Retain access to no-cost Google services
You will retain access to the no-cost version of Google Workspace services such as Google Drive and Google Meet, and additional Google services such as Google Search, Google Maps, and YouTube
Keep your purchases and data
You will retain access to paid content such as movie purchases at Google Play and data stored on Google Workspace
This option is for non-commercial personal use
Google may remove business functionality from this offering and transition businesses to Google Workspace. Additionally, this option will not include support.
So thanks Google.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuitelegacymigration/comments/ur5x...
Well, I already moved my custom domain email over to fastmail.
Been meaning to for a while anyway... I'd rather pay them a few bucks than keep having Google do whatever it was they were doing with my email (maybe nothing all that bad, but who the hell knows?)
The transition was smooth.
-- https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217?hl=en#nocost
This is aimed at people who migrated because Google announced that the previously free service would now be paid.
You paid because you needed more than the free tier.
Not saying you can't feel left out, but this announced path is about undoing a very specific thing, that you were not a part of.
Edit: I just followed the link from the other comment about contacting support…
> To get phone, chat, or email support for your legacy free account at [mydomain.com], you need to upgrade to Google Workspace
So I can’t contact them until the “upgrade” takes effect, and I get charged for it?!
(I went to Fastmail and have been mostly happy so far)
Especially with Google, they have the sort of high level decision making that is only sustainable if you are constantly drowning in cash. You need to give them a little time to come to their senses. Let the bad PR soak in a bit and work its way up the reporting chain.
You got rid of Google, you migrated to something that suits you better, you will not worry next time Google try to pull this stunt again.
In my book, those are 3 positives, not a screw-up.
And I wouldn't even mind paying. If you wanted to charge me just for email without any of the other stuff and not offer support, I'd pay $100 a year if you could give me unlimited (or even 25 or whatever the original number of email addresses was) separate inboxes. But when you insist on charging me $5 or $6 a month per address and domain (which for my completely personal use case would be $24 a month), and I'm not ever going to use any of the other stuff -- then I get annoyed. Especially since I could have just set up an alias on a free account, years later, when that became an option.
I understand these types of plans keep getting shut down because businesses or spammers or moochers abuse them, I do. But a personal/family targeted plan for hosted email with a custom domain should be something someone can offer that doesn't charge people $25 or $30 a month.
$6 monthly with unlimited (or some high number) of family member users would be fine.
Any cost at all will limit spammers.
I’m happy to pay. I’m not willing to pay $25 - $30 a month for basic email just because I want separate inboxes and a custom domain.
I'd gladly pay for the personal service if it wasn't per-user.
Though, I'm sure google got a lot of value out of this. I switched myself and many others onto gsuite early on. It was some of their first introductions to the "google apps" that have now become the structure for their "Workspace".
I have a few domains aliased to my main one on GSuite Legacy, with aliased email for friends and family that I brought in with the understanding that it was always free. And now I have to shoulder monthly costs for these people. Or push them out and be doing tech support to help them set up elsewhere.
I own my last name as a domain, and always thought it would be fun to use it for my primary email as firstname@lastname.com. Well... $6 a month for an individual "vanity" email address is already hard enough to justify once you realize Workspaces doesn't give you a "real" gmail account (google assistant, google one, etc... meaning you still need to maintain another gmail address, defeating the point), and then once you have 2, 3, 6 family members also wanting a vanity email address, the cost is just insane.
How is this not something anyone at Google have thought of? Gmail or use business accounts that come with a ton of strings attached.
I've also been around long enough to know not to try running my own email server anymore... been there, done that (Zimbra & Exchange). While possible, it will consume more of your time than you want.
It's just beyond me why the likes of Google and Microsoft have not come up with a Family plan for bringing your own domain name... one that doesn't cost $5-6+ per month per user.
The point of paying an email service is to make me not have to worry about it anymore. Gmail is free, and Workspace is $6 per user, Fastmail is $5 per user, etc.
If I'm anywhere near $20 monthly, I'd rather pay it to someone to have proper email and no "hacks". I just think it's absurd there is no "family & personal" option for any of these services... particularly Google where they could hoover up everyone's inbox like they already do in Gmail, plus make a few bucks monthly for the privilege of allowing me to use my own domain name.
That's literally all everyone wants here... GMail + Custom Domain Name. Google One should have this an a paid option and support X number of other users you can invite (family members with their own Gmail accounts). Families don't need retention policies, GDPR accreditation, etc.
So... It's artificially gimped for no real reason.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/ft15pk/use_perso...
The other nice side effect is I only use my gmail.com address for Google account related things. I don't get personal email there anymore and that inbox is pristine which is impressive since I've had it since Gmail launched.
My GSuite account, on the other hand, is quite a dumpster fire from years of personal email, aliases, and adding in other domains from time to time. Part of me would just like to walk away from it but too many things are tied to a number of email addresses in those domains.
I really do prefer Fastmail at this point, but I don't want to move these particular domains given how much junk gets sent to those addresses.
But... I wouldn't suggest using a vanity address as a primary Google account. Managing the two is worth the overhead and risk avoidance.
If in 2007 or 2008, Google had positioned this as a business product (and they didn’t. It was literally called Google Apps For Your Domain, promoted as a free service, and people were told to sign up their families or use it for their websites to get all the benefits of Gmail (which was and remains free) but on your own domain), that would be one thing. If in 2012 when they made it a legacy service, they’d told us, you can continue to pay but it’ll be “$X per domain and you won’t get any of these extra business features,” that would have been fine.
If in February or March or whenever this was announced, they had said, “if you want to convert this to a personal Gmail account that has aliasing setup” or you want to again, pay per domain (not per account) and not get certain Workspace features and zero support, that would have been fine.
Instead, we were told a bunch of conflicting things, we were encouraged to upgrade to accounts we didn’t need or to migrate to other providers, or those of us procrastinators (me) held out some hope we’d get a solution like we got. And I’m genuinely thankful for that decision.
But I still agree that there is a market — maybe not a huge one, but a market, for hosted email on a custom domain aimed at individuals and families that doesn’t charge per address.
I’m sure you would risk cannibalizing some business sales for people who would want to be cheap and claim to be a family, but businesses too cheap to pay for email accounts usually just use regular gmail accounts anyway. And with the right restrictions (on number of accounts and of message volume sent), I think you could still have a profitable endeavor. At least I’d like to think so.
Alas.
Migadu, MXroute, or one other which is a YC company that I fail to remember the name of (ImprovMX I think?).
Cloudflare is doing forwarding too now.
Cloudflare’s email forwarding was also a consideration. I prefer having separate actual inboxes, but I could create new gmail or Outlook accounts to forward to. I may use that for a new family homelab project, where my husband doesn’t want to monitor a new inbox.
(I see there's an email address at the bottom of the link in your bio FWIW, just in case someone might consider reaching out that way)
>You have chosen to continue using the Free Legacy Edition of G Suite for personal use.
>If you change your mind and want access to premium features, you can take advantage of a special discount by upgrading your subscription in the Google Admin Console.
What a self inflicted mess though since this is what should have been announced in the first place.
Unless your family has a foundation that's planning to give grants, this sounds like an abuse of Google's goodwill towards nonprofits.
If it's a 501-c-3, "sending donations to whatever my family wants to" may also not be valid, and may be considered a tax dodge.
(I am not a lawyer).
It's an overused trope, but this was so poorly planned, executed, and communicated and it can only be explained by decision makers actually being on drugs.
How much impact did you have :/
Good riddance… feelings mutual I guess.