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Google Apps Is No Longer Free For Business
Google Apps is a productivity and email solution which helps you to use Google services like Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Youtube and others using your own domain. This is especially useful for small and upcoming businesses and it removes the headache of maintaining your own mail servers and severely complicating things. Google Apps is a simple enough solution and can be deployed very easily.
There used to be 2 different versions of Google Apps. One was an enterprise level solution where users had to pay around $50 a year to use it. The other one was the free edition of Google Apps which initially allowed 200 people in an organisation to sign up for free. This limit was then brought down to 10 over the years. Now, Google has announced that there will no longer be any free edition of Google Apps. If your organisation has 10 users or 200, the service will cost you $50 per user per year.
The reason that Google gives behind this decision in their blog is that businesses that start out using free editions immediately outgrow their usage limits and then start needing support and features which makes it difficult from the business point of view. The free edition does not have 24 hours support and other features that the Enterprise level package has. Thus, Google has decided to charge everyone so that they can provide the same quality of product for everyone and not give different experiences to everyone based on the pricing.
It is to be noted that this new announcement is only valid for those who are going to sign up for Google Apps from now on. All those who are using free editions can keep using them. Google Apps for Governments will also be priced at $50 per user per year while Google Apps for Education will be free for schools and universities. The reason Google gives for the change may be true, but I can’t but suspect that they want to monetize apps because of the growing competition in the segment. Google has always been known for providing a heck of a lot of free services to individuals. It makes sense that they would want to monetize the enterprise and and business level services.
SMEs and small businesses will have to pay the $50 or look at cheaper solutions elsewhere. Some of them could be Zoho and Salesforce which have some decent pricing. Microsoft has its Office 365 for small businesses but that package is more expensive than Google Apps current pricing. Overall, the current Google App price is not bad as $50 a year gets you a 25 Gb inbox, 99.9% uptime, 24/7 phone support over any issue and access to all of Google’s standard apps.
However, if you want to still sign up for the free edition of Google Apps, Amit Agarwal from Labnol has a workaround that you will like. Check it out here.
Website | Google Apps
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2012-12-07 20:41:27
Source: http://www.watblog.com/2012/12/07/google-apps-is-no-longer-free-for-business/
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