[kwlug-disc] G Suite Free not free anymore

[Chris Irwin]

On Sat, Jan 22, 2022 at 12:24:02PM -0500, Nickle, Brian wrote:
>I have used Google Apps pretty much since their inception to host my
>personal domain email.  However as of May Google will not allow free
>hosting and wants me to pay $7.80/month/user (i have 6).  I'm not really
>keen on self hosting email (too much upkeep).  What I wonder is how are
>others hosting their domains and email these days?

Same here. I self-hosted before I moved in 2008, and switched to Google 
Apps "temporarily" to avoid downtime. It turns out, I didn't miss self 
hosting.

I'm dealing with three single-user domains, not three users on one 
domain, because google only allowed the additional domains to be aliases 
at the time, and that isn't what I wanted.

Since then, Android has come along, so that's the primary login for our 
phones. So it's not "just" email now.

>One of my biggest concerns is my personal domain account is my primary
>google account for my android devices.  It is trivial to move my email but
>I have concerns regarding losing access to my play store purchases (apps,
>movies, books) also will miss nice things like calendar and storage and
>chat. Google hasn't released many details on this change it seems like most
>articles are just speculating.  If anyone has any good sources of info I
>would welcome them.

All three of us also pay $28/year for additional storage (for photos).  
So the google bill will be significant -- $365/year!!!

Curiously, free gmail accounts can share their storage addon as a 
"Family" -- something we can't do with domain accounts. So we'd only pay 
$40/year for storage (200GB), rather than $28/user/year (100GBx3).

As you said, moving email is easy (and honestly, calendar/contacts isn't 
much harder).

Losing app purchases sucks -- but rebuying is significantly less than a 
one year bill from Google (and a lot of my app purchases are for EOL 
apps anyway).  I never used their books or movies.

My major, major hangup is photos. Ideally, I'd prefer to use something 
more privacy-centric for photos, but I just can't get anything close to 
the convenience of being able to search "Alexis Van" and getting a photo 
of my wife with a "Mystery Machine" replica at a car show 10 years ago.

There also doesn't seem to be a good way to move photos to another 
account.  I just finished a Google Takeout of my photos (80GB) and will 
try uploading that into a gmail account to test.

>I don't have a problem paying for email and services but $42 /month is 
>a little steep.

Ditto. Personally I moved my email to fastmail a few years ago. Just me 
(not the other two domains), and just email/contacts/calendar (I still 
use my google account for android, photos, and apps, as mentioned 
above).

I settled on them because:

     1. They work on open source (Cyrus IMAP) and are trying to get a new 
     email spec adopted (JMAP). I've used the former, and the latter 
     sounds interesting.

     2. They support standard protocols -- IMAP, CalDAV, CardDAV, (and 
     JMAP, if you want to count that).

     3. They don't do ads, or free accounts (They do a free trial 
     though).

     4. They've been doing this longer than gmail existed.

Their pricing isn't exactly stellar though. A basic account is 
USD$30/year/user. I have more than 2GB of mail, so I'm paying 
USD$50/year. That's a lot when you consider it's *just* email. But they 
also only make their money from this, not from data mining and ads... So 
pick your poison I guess.

-- 
Chris Irwin

email:   chris at chrisirwin.ca
  xmpp:   chris at chrisirwin.ca
   web: https://chrisirwin.ca