Google Requiring All Legacy 'G Suite Free Edition' Users to migrate to Paid Workspace Plans

I use the Office 365 Family but don’t want to use godaddy for my custom domain… Looking at O365 Business options - looks like I can get Exchange Online Plan 1 for $4/mo/user that gives a 50GB mailbox or Exchange Online Kiosk for $2/mo/user for 2 GB mailbox - that’d be tough to keep but you could probably upgrade easy enough once you hit the 2GB mark.

Kiosk also doesn’t allow you to connect a desktop app, it’s OWA and mobile apps only.

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Just got the email today.

Dear Administrator,

We are writing to let you know that your G Suite legacy free edition will no longer be available starting July 1, 2022 . To maintain your services and accounts, you need to upgrade to Google Workspace .

We launched our G Suite legacy free edition —the original Google Apps offering for businesses and schools— 16 years ago. In 2012 we discontinued this service, and we will now transition all remaining users to an upgraded Google Workspace paid subscription based on your usage.

What does this mean for my organization?

In 2020, we introduced — Google Workspace — and tailored our offerings to provide more options to fit our customers’ needs. Google Workspace includes all the features you already use, plus several new capabilities including more storage, increased security, 24/7 support, and more.

Upgrading from your G Suite legacy free edition to Google Workspace will only take you a few short steps and is not disruptive to your end-users. To support you in this transition, you will have discount options for 12 months after July 1, 2022.

What do I need to do?

To avoid disruption and maintain your account(s), please upgrade to Google Workspace by May 1, 2022. Begin the upgrade by reviewing the transition help center article, and selecting the option that best suits your organization’s needs. When you’ve identified your preferred subscription:

  1. Go to your Admin console.
  2. Select your new subscription offering.
  3. Enter your billing information.

Once you’re upgraded, you can use your new Google Workspace subscription and functionality at no-cost until at least July 1, 2022 .

If you take no action by May 1, 2022, Google will begin upgrading your organization seamlessly to a new Google Workspace subscription. The new subscription will be based on what you currently use with your G Suite legacy free edition .

If you do not enter your billing details before July 1, 2022, your subscription will be suspended .

If your needs have changed and you do not want to upgrade to a Google Workspace subscription, you can export your organization’s data with the takeout feature.

FAQs

Visit the help center for information on the G Suite legacy free edition to Google Workspace transition.

Good news!

The support page detailing the shutdown has quietly been updated (for some reason, Google is not making a big deal of the changes yet). First, if (and only if) you’re signed in with a free G Suite account, you’ll see a link to this survey, which is aimed at free G Suite admins with 10 users or fewer using the service for “non-business” purposes. Google says users filling out the survey will receive “updates on more options for your non-business legacy account in the coming months.” It’s a sign that Google had no idea how many people this change would affect, and now, the company wants to hear from you.

In the coming months, we’ll provide an option for you to move your non-Google Workspace paid content and most of your data to a no-cost option. This new option won’t include premium features like custom email or multi-account management. You’ll be able to evaluate this option prior to July 1, 2022 and prior to account suspension. We’ll update this article with details in the coming months.

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Worth noting that what little information we have just suggests that sub ten accounts used for personal purposes may get the option to convert individual users to plain google users. So individual @gmail.com accounts.

If you are using workspace for custom email domains, or so you could reset your dads password when he forgot, you have still got to make your decisions.

Interesting. :slight_smile:

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Just an update: ZoHo does allow for quite a few aliases, but does not support plus addressing, which is a bummer. I’ll have to change quite a few online accounts and just use a “catchall” mailbox for all the weird ones.

It doesn’t even support using a + in an alias.

Any other groupware style services that you know of that support plus addressing, by any chance?

Exchange Online (M365) now supports plus addressing if you turn it on.

However, I assume your looking for cheaper answers. Some of my friends have spoken highly of Migadu as a simplistic IMAP/SMTP host which supports plus addressing.

Note that Migadu will have some issues as all secondary MTA’s will. The features are sparse, the webmail is ugly, the spam filtering isn’t amazing - but it’s inexpensive and gives you a standards compliant hosted IMAP and a better-than-VPS ip trust rating. -K

I believe they do support plus addresses…

  • Sent from my VPS mail server

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Not sure how I missed this before, but I just got an email today.

…Discontinued in 2012, the G Suite legacy free edition has provided access to premium Google Apps features for over 10 years. On June 1, 2022, Google will begin upgrading G Suite legacy free edition accounts to Google Workspace…

We’ve had the free G Suite for Nonprofits since before they added the discriminatory clause to the signup process, and our leadership has no interest in going through a transition and learning something new. My hunch is that they’re going to be willing to pay and I’m going to have to figure out how to clean up all the extra accounts that were setup for some little purpose at some point and hardly get used.

The default transition process takes you to the Standard Business edition that will end up being $12 per user per month. After a little digging, there’s also a Google Business for Nonprofits edition, but I’m having trouble finding much about it. Has anyone used that one?

If you’re on Google Workspace for Nonprofits, I don’t think anything changes for you. The product they’re eliminating was something a small business (for-profit) would use for up to 10 free accounts. First, see what you have…

Here are the non-profit options.

That’s awesome! Their support said they couldn’t, but then again, their support asked me what product I was asking about despite it being in both my subject line and body of my message, so I think they may have misunderstood my question.

For now, I think I may just stick with ZoHo so we can still have shared calendars and iOS app connectivity until I can consolidate our email addresses enough to justify an M365 account.

I have been using GSuite legacy free edition for many years for my personal email. It was great while it lasted. It had all the right features, worked very well and the price couldn’t be beat. I decided to move to protonmail. I like their emphasis on privacy and security. I have a paid subscription, mainly so that I can use my own domain name.

This sure keeps getting more and more interesting… Upgrade from G Suite legacy free edition - Google Workspace Admin Help has been updated once again.

If you’re using the G Suite legacy free edition for non-commercial purposes, you can opt out of the transition to Google Workspace by clicking here (requires a super administrator account) or going to the Google Admin console. You can continue using your custom domain with Gmail, retain access to no-cost Google services such as Google Drive and Google Meet, and keep your purchases and data.

If you don’t take any action, your account will be suspended starting on August 1, 2022. To reactivate your account, you will either need to upgrade to Google Workspace or opt out of the transition for non-commercial use.

G Suite legacy free edition is only intended for personal non-commercial use. If you’re using G Suite legacy free edition for business purposes, we will transition your account to Google Workspace. G Suite legacy free edition does not include support, and in the future we may remove certain business functionality.

If you transitioned to Google Workspace after January 19, 2022 and used G Suite legacy free edition for personal use, you can contact Support.

After migrating all my emails to a different service… tenor1

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I know, right? Had we known this was going to be the end result I’m sure most of us would’ve kicked the can a lot further down the road.

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I tried starting the migration process over the weekend but home repairs took over, so for once my procrastinating paid off. :slight_smile:

Of course, I used to use this for my side business that I closed 10+ years ago, so we’ll see if they recognize my use as personal (since it only has my family on it).

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Update. I went ahead with the process of signing up for “Google Workspace for Nonprofits” (from G Suite legacy). As expected, I ran into this screen.

image

I showed it to a superior, that was against migrating, who said, “we’ve never discriminated against anyone” and checked the box for me.

The rest of the process was seamless, and each user now has 30 GB of storage instead of 15.

I think it probably depends mostly on your hiring practices. We don’t discriminate against people on a “how we value them” or “if they are allowed to participate” perspective, and have frequently served communities we disagree with biblically, but we do discriminate in hiring and employment practices as allowed by law for a church on many criteria, including sexual orientation and gender identity.

I think if your ministry is willing to hire people regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, you will have no issues legally with this, but I’m not a lawyer so I could be misinterpreting all of this.

For us, we weren’t able to check that box which was the final deciding factor in jumping to Microsoft 365 (at a time that I was a Google fanboy and not a huge fan of Microsoft). It is definitely more expensive for a church to use M365 than Google for Nonprofits, but I am very happy with the outcome, so if you ever wind up having to migrate, it isn’t as bad as it has been years past.

Ah excellent, my can kicking* has paid off! And they told me procrastinating was bad for you!

*I’ll probably still end up migrating to ProtonMail sometime this year. Or never.

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