from Hacker News

Google Workspace increasing prices from April 11, 2023

by lightwin on 2/16/23, 9:22 PM with 136 comments

• by dotBen on 2/16/23, 11:16 PM

  Even at twice the price, the value of the collective Google Workspaces suite for most people is a no brainer.

  I pay more per month to the calendar scheduling SaaS provider I use than I do to Google - who provide the calendar plus email, drive, docs, meet, etc.

  An important lesson here for founders is price anchoring. Google is in a tough place because the prices are anchored to historically low amounts - they're increasing them by $1/m because that's about all they can do and the talk of 'all the next value' is their best attempt to break out of that anchor. If they were to bring this suite to the market today, I bet it would start at the $20/m mark.

• by prepend on 2/16/23, 11:05 PM

  For monthly, saas, products why would the price increase “to reflect value added to our products” since it’s a recurring fee it should always pay for new features to be added.

  It’s sad to see the “digital magic economies” of software slowly transform to normal commodity slow price increases to support brands and locked in markets.

  I guess it will be a race to suck between Office and Google.

  I hope an innovator comes along and provides a software layer on top of cloud storage like Dropbox (that isn’t tied to a particular storage like Dropbox is). Software should cost $100/year for your entire life.

• by thehappypm on 2/16/23, 11:22 PM

  Thread A: I hate ads. Can’t I just pay for web sites?

  Thread B: WTF, I have to pay for a web site?

• by mrbonner on 2/16/23, 10:58 PM

  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?

• by sarangab on 2/16/23, 9:47 PM

  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.

• by thomaslord on 2/16/23, 11:01 PM

  My company was forced to move from our previous G Suite plan to Google Workspace. In order to keep the same monthly price, we went with Business Starter.

  Now each user can only share a Google Doc with 5 non-Google users per month. This limitation seems entirely artificial and designed entirely to push people onto more expensive plans.

• by metadat on 2/16/23, 9:54 PM

  $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.

• by correlator on 2/16/23, 9:36 PM

  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.

• by thecrumb on 2/16/23, 11:53 PM

  Problem with Google Workspace is it's still (!) disconnected from Google and a lot of things don't work like they do with a traditional @gmail account. I run into this all the time and it's so frustrating.

• by boneitis on 2/16/23, 10:49 PM

  > 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?

• by jefftk on 2/16/23, 9:37 PM

  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).

• by jerrac on 2/17/23, 5:26 AM

  Makes me wonder, at what point will people start self hosting again, instead of getting dragged around by large companies like Google and Microsoft? I manage my own email server for myself and family. That, plus Next cloud gives me everything I'd need from Google/etc. Plus I host a few extra sites and services that GSuite/365 can't replicate. I'm fairly confident I could scale to a few hundred users if I took it seriously. Even more if I had someone else as a backup. The reliance on vendors and sass products for everything kinda baffles me.

• by joecool1029 on 2/16/23, 10:23 PM

  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.

• by nunez on 2/16/23, 10:30 PM

  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.

• by locusm on 2/17/23, 12:38 AM

  Something else to keep in mind when using Google Apps is Google will charge you a close out fee if youre on an annual plan and want to upgrade. Most customers find themselves wanting to do this upon reaching max mailbox size and it cant be done from the admin panel.

• by thefounder on 2/16/23, 10:29 PM

  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.

• by candiddevmike on 2/16/23, 9:37 PM

  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.

• by ehPReth on 2/16/23, 11:17 PM

  Oh darn. Anyone have any insight as to how much the "Enterprise" levels increasing assuming base cost no negotiated discounts?

• by nexxer on 2/17/23, 9:41 AM

  Steve Holt!

• by wslh on 2/16/23, 9:33 PM

  Inflation? Monopoly?

• by notatoad on 2/16/23, 10:19 PM

  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.

• by sschueller on 2/16/23, 11:18 PM

  I'm done, first they force all previously grandfathered accounts to pay and now they are increasing the price less than a few months later.

  Additionally if a legacy user that had extra storage accidentally lets the renewal lapse you can not repurchase it, you are forced to upgrade all users to a higher tier at a ridiculous cost.

  I'm giving Tutanota a try and use other self hosted services for photos and drive.