Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying
I knew something like this would probably come, but it doesn&#x27;t make it any better. Complete BS.<p>16 years ago me and my friends signed up for &quot;GMail for your domain&quot;. That&#x27;s it. We wanted to use GMail, which was by far the best email available at the time, and have email addresses at our own domain instead of @gmail.com. That&#x27;s it.<p>Since that time several of us have been using our GFYD&#x2F;GSuite&#x2F;Workspaces accounts as our primary Google accounts. We&#x27;re not a business. We don&#x27;t use any business features. We just use them as our personal Google accounts. We use them for YouTube, Photos, everything. Our entire digital identities are bound to these accounts.<p>Yet, over the years, these accounts are just worse than free personal Google accounts. Because we are not a business, there is absolutely no benefit to these accounts whatsoever other than the custom domain. In fact, we can&#x27;t even use the new version of Google Pay. It only works with free accounts! We all had to switch to other payment platforms to split bills. Ironically, we&#x27;ll have to use one of those non-Google platforms to split the Google Workspaces bill as well.<p>And now we&#x27;re being forced to pay for something that everyone else gets for free. I&#x27;d be less angry if we got some kind of benefit above and beyond normal free Google accounts. I&#x27;d be less angry if the price wasn&#x27;t a ridiculous per-user rate. I&#x27;d be less angry if we weren&#x27;t forced into this against our will. This is not what we signed up for 16 years ago. I&#x27;d be less angry if they offered some way to escape. Let use merge&#x2F;transition our accounts with personal Google accounts. Let us have personal accounts with custom domain, iCloud offers that feature now.<p>Nope. Just looks like most of our accounts are going to get deleted or are going to have to pay $6&#x2F;month for nothing.