[HN Gopher] Google Workspace increasing prices from April 11, 2023
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Google Workspace increasing prices from April 11, 2023
Author : lightwin
Score : 90 points
Date : 2023-02-16 21:22 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (workspace.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (workspace.google.com)
| notatoad wrote:
| if they could only make their chat worthwhile this would be
| reasonable pricing. but as long as the decision is to pay for
| google workspace _and_ slack, or else microsoft including teams,
| then microsoft seems like a better deal. i know teams gets a lot
| of hate, but it 's at least usable.
| fragmede wrote:
| What's missing from Google chat for you?
| mrbonner wrote:
| It is time for me to evaluate my custom domain email service. I
| had the original/free Google workspace with custom email domain.
| In 2021, they charged me $6/month to keep that option afloat. To
| be honest, I think $6/month is a bit expensive for just email
| usage. I don't even use any other stuff coming with Suite. My
| question for this group: how do I get out of this without losing
| my email domain?
| sarangab wrote:
| We switched from Google to Zoho Workspace last year once they
| threatened to stop support to the "legacy" users. Comparable
| service and much less expensive.
| JamesAdir wrote:
| +1 for Zoho. They offer a all the services needed at a very
| convenient pricing.
| iamjkt wrote:
| The pricing is good, but the experience for mail is poor.
|
| I move from Zoho to Fastmail a year later and it's a much
| slicker experience.
|
| (Just mail, I didn't use any of Zoho's collaborative tools.)
| [deleted]
| CSMastermind wrote:
| And because of this HN thread I will now be looking into Zoho
| to see if it's viable for me to migrate to.
| trvz wrote:
| - https://techmonitor.ai/technology/cybersecurity/zoho-
| hack-em...
|
| - https://www.zdnet.com/article/red-cross-traces-hack-back-
| to-...
|
| - https://cybernews.com/news/fintech-breach-following-
| critical...
|
| - https://therecord.media/hackers-exploiting-vulnerability-
| aff...
| partiallypro wrote:
| Zoho is great, if you only need email and basics. O365 and
| GSuite are still unmatched as a package though. Still think
| O365 is the best deal (for SMBs+), though it's a bit more.
| donmcronald wrote:
| I use Zoho for my personal domains and in a lot of ways I
| prefer it over Google Workspace and MS365. It feels...
| pragmatic.
|
| I have the most experience with MS365. It's slow and so much
| configuration is asynchronous that sometimes I feel like I'm
| dialing in for a non-deterministic adventure.
| a1371 wrote:
| That hasn't been my experience with ZOHO at all. I used their
| free service first and then stepped up. Their tools are not
| great and they really love to sell you multiple licenses to get
| the basic stuff going. I'm sure people have different needs but
| I won't be using them again.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| Thanks for the submission, we are resellers and the email they
| sent out was vague and didn't include a price sheet. We are very
| used to getting shit on at this point.
|
| Last week they stressed us out emailing us about a few users
| reaching resource limits and rather than name the customers they
| just sent a CSV with some Google internal customer_id we aren't
| privy to. A day later they corrected it using another faceless id
| that is at least on our billing statements.
| wslh wrote:
| Inflation? Monopoly?
| aimkey wrote:
| Lock in
| CydeWeys wrote:
| There's no lock in here. People are free to switch to one of
| the many competing services. It's not a monopoly under any
| reasonable definition of the term. Of course switching is
| going to have inertia, but that's not lock in. Lock in is
| when you are contractually obligated not to change, or if the
| monopoly is shutting down all competing services (perhaps by
| acquisition) so that there are no alternatives. For a good
| example of this type of lock in, just look at Ticketmaster.
| murphyslab wrote:
| No, you seem to be confusing "vendor lock-in" with
| "monopoly". The above isn't what is meant by "vendor lock-
| in". Here's a good explanation by Cloudflare:
|
| > Vendor lock-in refers to a situation where the cost of
| switching to a different vendor is so high that the
| customer is essentially stuck with the original vendor.
| Because of financial pressures, an insufficient workforce,
| or the need to avoid interruptions to business operations,
| the customer is "locked in" to what may be an inferior
| product or service.
|
| https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/cloud/what-is-vendor-
| loc...
|
| A practical example of vendor lock-in is an elderly aunt
| with mine who has an email address from her ISP. She isn't
| "contractually obligated" to continue using that email, nor
| the ISP. The ISP certainly doesn't have a monopoly on
| email. But the effort to switch from an email that she's
| been using for 15 years is very high for someone with weak
| tech skills. I'm probably in a similar situation with
| Gmail, as it's the primary contact by which most people
| know me. I can't take my Gmail address and port it; I have
| to create a new email and get people to update their
| address books.
| nickfromseattle wrote:
| > There's no lock in here. People are free to switch to one
| of the many competing services.
|
| There is significant lock-in with email because:
|
| 1 - Email migration sucks and if you're a big org, this
| process can/will be complicated, expensive and carry
| potential down time for end-users.
|
| 2 - The bigger you are, the less willing you are to go
| through with #1 without a _really_ , _really,_ really*
| ridiculously good reason
| benatkin wrote:
| No refunds. So it's literally lock-in for a year.
|
| https://support.google.com/google-workspace-
| individual/answe... (for individual)
| https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2736362?hl=en (for
| Drive) - I don't see it for Admin but it's probably the
| same.
|
| Here's one for Google Workspace Admin: "The Annual Plan
| charges you for the exact number of licenses you signed up
| for through a yearly commitment." The "commitment" makes it
| sound non-refundable.
| https://support.google.com/a/answer/1230658?hl=en
| [deleted]
| kweingar wrote:
| How can Workspace be a monopoly when Microsoft 365 is a popular
| alternative?
| wslh wrote:
| It was a question, as the other comment says, lock-in is
| probably one of the answers.
| thefounder wrote:
| I just went to Zoho after the "legacy" policy. It's just doesnt
| worth it. I need just an imap email service with custom domain
| name.
| nunez wrote:
| I tried moving away from Workspace to Offi^H^H^HMicrosoft 365
| last month. I chose 365 since my wife primarily uses a Surface
| and Microsoft products, which would make it easy for us to
| collaborate.
|
| It looks like an excellent solution for SMBs or larger who have a
| dedicated admin that can tend to it.
|
| For a nobody like me, it was a hot goddamned mess. Death by a few
| big cuts and thousands of small ones.
|
| These are the things that bothered me most, in no particular
| order:
|
| - Microsoft has a migration service to move email, calendars, and
| contacts into 365 from Workspace! Wanna find it? Good luck! It's
| buried (IMO) deep into the onboarding documentation. Finding it
| was not obvious at all.
|
| - The migration service also didn't work! I had a few years of
| emails and calendars in my Workspace. It would frequently error
| out due to API timeouts, even while transferring. While I was
| eventually able to get (most of?) my emails into 365, I had to
| import my calendar and contacts manually. (I wasn't confident
| that 365 got _all_ of my emails either.)
|
| - 365 and Google don't map contact fields one for one. As a
| result, while I had all of my contacts on my devices, their
| numbers were missing. Fixing this took longer than I wanted it
| to.
|
| - "OneDrive" for Business is a complete joke compared to Google
| Drive. Microsoft's offering is "here's a 30GB SharePoint
| installation". This was particularly troublesome for me given
| that my wife and I have a shared folder on Google Drive and an
| equivalent on OneSharePoint wasn't immediately obvious.
|
| - There are 750 billion different Admin panels! You can configure
| everything in your Workspace tenant from admin.google.com. On
| 365? You'll need to use admin.exchange for your mail, Azure (!!!)
| for your authentication, portal.office.com for some other stuff,
| etc.
|
| - 365 enables passwordless auth through Authenticator, which is a
| good thing, but this also disables IMAP login, which is not good.
|
| - Due to Microsoft pushing admins to use PowerShell more often
| several years ago, there are many configuration options that
| cannot be done by UI. You need to do it via PowerShell. While
| this isn't a problem for me (PowerShell used to be my primary
| language years and years ago), this is a problem when I want to
| make a change that took less than five minutes to do on
| Workspace.
|
| - In the year of Our Lord 2023, Microsoft thinks it's appropriate
| to give Microsoft 365 users at 50GB inbox by default. 50!
| GIGABYTES!
|
| - Exchange's anti-spam filtering is outrageously aggressive! This
| was the final straw for me. A lot of really important email would
| get sent to Junk (which has an auto-delete policy by default!) I
| had to check my Junk folder every day, something I haven't needed
| to do in years on Google Workspace. I'm sure there's a setting
| deep within admin.exchange to tune this, but it was not obvious
| when I looked.
|
| So while I'm not a huge fan of paying Google $12/month ($20/mo
| now), it's still the best solution for people like me who want
| more than what Gmail and Calendar can provide but not an entire
| enterprisey solution.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > The migration service also didn't work! I had a few years of
| emails and calendars in my Workspace.
|
| Migrating mail into MS365 is a terrible experience. I've set up
| over 30 tenants and migrated mail for them and there's no good
| tooling. Both the Microsoft options and all the 3rd party
| options I've tried do an extremely poor job or error handling
| and reconciliation.
|
| Microsoft's IMAP sync is so bad at reconciliation that IMO it's
| reasonable to call the data integrity rating a lie. I've dealt
| with some really small mailboxes where you could almost grok
| the data just by skimming it and the (number of message) counts
| for imported mail were flat out wrong.
|
| With the amount of money they charge per user per month you'd
| think there would be some incentive to create migration tooling
| that isn't hot trash, but maybe that's just me.
| Aeolun wrote:
| What's wrong with a 50gb inbox? That's what I get from
| Fastmail, and I'm not even scratching the surface.
| boneitis wrote:
| > Third, we are increasing the price of Google Workspace
| Enterprise Standard to reflect the value we've added to the
| edition [..] for large enterprises.
|
| But, they can't tell us by how much?
| atonse wrote:
| It's Whatever the enterprise can stomach.
| correlator wrote:
| It looks like you need to pay for a full year upfront to keep the
| legacy pricing. The month to month payment plans are seeing a
| price increase.
| jefftk wrote:
| Up 20%:
|
| _Starter: $6 - > $7.20_
|
| _Standard: $12 - > $14.40_
|
| _Plus: $18 - > $21.60_
|
| They are also introducing an annual payment option where you can
| pay the old per-month prices ($6, $12, $18).
| alberth wrote:
| Let's not forget that just 3.5 years ago, prices were increase
| by 20% then as well.
|
| Starter: $5 -> $6
|
| Standard: $10 -> $12
|
| https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/new-pricing-f...
|
| This nets to ~45% price increase in just 3.5 years.
| kweingar wrote:
| Interestingly the new prices match inflation since April 2019
| pretty closely ($6 then is $7.02 now, and the price is
| changing to $7.20).
| eschulz wrote:
| That's exactly what I was thinking. $5 to $7.20 in four
| years isn't ideal, but seems like so many other essential
| goods and services have increased at a much higher rate
| over that period of time.
| [deleted]
| blibble wrote:
| they had an annual plan previously
|
| then dumped it, effectively raising the price
|
| now they've raised the price again and have and brought the
| annual plan back as a "discount"
|
| (no doubt the annual plan will disappear again as another
| stealth price increase)
| [deleted]
| candiddevmike wrote:
| What are you going to do, move to a different service? Switching
| out your cloud hosted office suite is probably a non starter for
| most companies.
| firecall wrote:
| The Cloud is the new File Format lock-in!
| wcfields wrote:
| It's a straight up nightmare to move email providers.
| Especially if you have an office environment built around
| GDocs, Gmail and trying to get people to move to Office365.
| acdha wrote:
| Email is by far the easiest of those things. Docs & workflows
| aren't as standard so it's not just an import but also
| changing how you work.
| rconti wrote:
| I _just_ finally switched from a personal account to Workspace
| so I was a little concerned. Thankfully the price increase is
| minimal (and will be 0 since I can just pay annually).
| JamesAdir wrote:
| Enterprises have long term contracts with deep discounts on
| official pricing and locked in pricing on many services.
| afandian wrote:
| The lock-in is true. But it's still worrying.
| xoa wrote:
| > _What are you going to do, move to a different service?_
|
| Probably yes for a few of my clients. They're only using the
| email and calendars, and only via applications (Mac/iOS
| Mail/Calendar, Outlook, or TB). Two of them started on the free
| one. Primarily staying with GSuite has been a matter of inertia
| and ensuring delivery, all the other stuff is worthless. This
| will probably be motivation to make the move this time. Other
| companies might have kept and "basics only tier", but I just
| don't think Google is serious about anything but ads when it
| comes to money. Even their subscription stuff seems frequently
| poorly supported, though perhaps it's better for the biggest
| players.
|
| I'm very thankful I always pushed hard against webmail, had
| registrar/DNS independent and so on. It's added friction in
| some cases but means switching is pretty transparent. Lots
| don't have that luxury of course, but it's been nice here.
| Rimintil wrote:
| Moving from GSuite to M365 is a fairly popular move. Consulting
| companies build around this service.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I've seen more movement in the opposite direction, from M365
| to Google.
|
| Mostly from companies who chose Microsoft before G Suite
| became popular for business.
|
| But maybe it's industry-dependent?
|
| In any case, you definitely need consultants because it's a
| pain no matter which direction you're going. Not a decision
| to take lightly, and you're not going to switch again for
| another 15 years.
| nunez wrote:
| Much much MUCH easier said than done, especially if you've
| co-mingled your Google for Apps/G-Suite/Workspace account
| with other Google services.
|
| Migrating contacts and calendars is easy, thanks to open
| standards (unless you're migrating in bulk)
|
| Migrating email and validating the migration is a HUGE pain
| and takes forever.
|
| Data from any other Google service is basically unusable
| anywhere else. Yes, you can export it via Google Takeout, but
| they are all but proprietary.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| >Migrating contacts and calendars is easy, thanks to open
| standards (unless you're migrating in bulk)
|
| Ehhhhh, Workspace has a half-assed EAS implementation that
| works until it doesn't (just had a client where it stopped
| exporting all his phone numbers, the data was still in
| Google but their EAS just wasn't outputting it). It's
| hardly an open standard but theoretically works for Outlook
| users migrating to Exchange.
|
| Going anywhere else with an Outlook desktop user that
| actually follows the open standards (CardDav/CalDav) is
| extreme pain because Outlook lacks native support, so you
| need to use a plugin that will pull the data but not
| present it in the same way. The earlier mentioned client I
| moved to Fastmail and I still haven't figured out how to
| get his 'contact folders' to show and sync in Outlook
| without heavily customizing the views. Otherwise works in
| Android with DavX and iOS natively.
| metadat wrote:
| $20/mo still isn't bad for unlimited storage. Do any other
| providers come close to this price point?
|
| I wish I could prepay for the next 10 years to lock in at this
| price.
|
| How much does a petabyte of redundant hard drive storage cost?
| Yeah.. will probably still be more than $2,500 USD in 10 years.
| esalman wrote:
| I don't think there's an option to even pay for one year right
| now. It at least was the case last year when they pulled the
| plug on free tier and I had reluctantly give them credit card
| information for essentially a one person company.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| Workspace and Personal accounts use different payment
| systems. Last I checked the personal account storage payments
| were through Google Wallet.
|
| For Workspace accounts there probably isn't an option for
| end-users to pay for a year ahead. For resellers like me, we
| used to get discounts a few years ago if we had clients go on
| annual contracts. They removed those discounts so we steered
| the majority of clients to flex plans.
|
| If that wasn't enough of a motivation to go flex, whatever
| clown MBA's run this division of Google decided it would be
| fun to create a new certification system for resellers over
| the past couple years. We didn't complete the 12 hours or so
| of Powerpoints and exams so while I can provision new
| customers if I have an annual contracted customer smack the
| resource limits I can't actually upgrade their license unless
| I rage at Google Partner connect to override and do it for
| me. Leaving customers on flex gives us the ability to upgrade
| and downgrade at will. It's literally the only company I've
| ever dealt with that makes it this hard to upgrade to a
| higher paid contract, they just leave money on the table.
| There's absolutely no incentive for a small reseller like me
| to upsell an annual contract that chains my hands, this
| notice that the discounts are coming back is such a joke.
| shj2105 wrote:
| It's not unlimited storage though? It used to be but my
| understanding is that they started enforcing the storage limits
| late last year.
| metadat wrote:
| Hmm, unfortunate if they discontinued it. Maybe my account
| was grandfathered in.
| remus wrote:
| Not sure what subscription you're on but the highest tier
| still has "as much storage as you need" or similar wording.
| I assume they've moved away from the unlimited wording
| because it was abused.
| trvz wrote:
| Unlimited storage is still available for subscriptions that
| have been kept active since it was officially a thing.
| gowld wrote:
| Do you need a petabyte of storage?
| metadat wrote:
| I don't _need_ anything, eventually I 'll probably die.
|
| In the meantime..
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2023-02-16 23:00 UTC)