G Suite legacy free edition

~ the eulogy ~

On 19 January 2022 Google sent an email to a group of accounts it had refused to sell for the previous nine years. The free tier they were sitting on was ending. Move to a paid Google Workspace plan by 1 May, or the account stops working.

The thing being taken away was old. It launched on 28 August 2006 as Google Apps for Your Domain, a free beta that let anyone who owned a domain name run Gmail on it. Calendar came in the same bundle, along with a page builder called Page Creator that Google itself buried years ago. There was no charge, the cap started generous and drifted down to ten users, and for six years anybody could sign up.

Google closed it to new customers on 6 December 2012 and left the existing accounts alone. That is the detail that made 2022 sting. These were people who had been quietly grandfathered for a decade, told nothing, billed nothing, and given every reason to assume the arrangement was permanent.

I did not have an account on this one, so the closest I get is the shape of it. A free tier that puts real mail on a domain you own is the kind of infrastructure an engineer sets up once in an afternoon and then does not think about again for ten years. That is exactly why the January email hit the way it did. It arrived at a category of user who had long since stopped monitoring the product.

~ the dossier ~

~ the offer ~

In 2006 the offer made complete sense for Google. Hosting mail for hobbyists cost almost nothing at Gmail's scale, and every family domain running on Google infrastructure was a small permanent argument against Microsoft Exchange. The free tier was a land grab dressed as generosity, and it worked. A large number of the small businesses that later paid for Workspace started on an account that cost them nothing.

~ the revolt ~

The reaction in January and February 2022 was worse than Google expected. Most of the affected accounts belonged to grandparents running a surname domain, or to people whose only email address had lived at a domain of their own since 2007, and all of them were now being quoted six dollars a user a month to keep it.

On 16 May 2022 Google blinked. A new option appeared called staying on the no-cost legacy edition, available to anyone willing to confirm the account was for personal use only, with a deadline of 27 June to opt out of the forced upgrade. Custom email and multi-account administration were stripped out of it. The mailbox and the domain stayed.

~ what replaced it ~

For commercial users nothing was reversed. The free tier ended on 1 July 2022 as announced, discounts were dangled for the following twelve months, and accounts that had ignored every email were suspended from 1 August. Whatever survives today under a custom domain at no cost is a personal-use carve-out that exists because enough people complained in public for four months.

Sixteen years is a long grandfather clause. It was still a clause, and the people it covered found that out by email on a Wednesday morning in January.

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