I'm not sure if I'm parsing this correctly, but it sounds like people who use Google Apps as an email backend for personal email on custom domains will now have to pay $50/year.
If so, that's a huge bummer. I only recently switched to running my email this way and I don't relish the thought of migrating elsewhere so soon.
I would happily pay $50/year (or perhaps more... I don't know how high I'd go) for email that's not only convenient and spam free, but also well protected from governments and the provider's employees, and not data mined.
I have absolutely no use for phone support or 99.9 uptime for my personal email. So the businessification of Google mail is not a win for me. Privacy and convenience or what I'm after.
I think you missed this sentence. "Please note this change has no impact on our existing customers, including those using the free version." Still, I'm on free google apps mostly for a personal email domain too and will likely start considering alternatives just in case.
I'd also note that the $50/year is also per user, so there's sort of an opening to offer a family, personal domain type service. For a family of a maybe 2-6 users, the $50/year-user is a bit steep if you're mostly looking for a small group email + calendaring. Maybe that would even be an interesting vector for starting a new family-based social networking service.
I actually considered an email address like firstname@lastname.com. I figured I could add my parents, or future children.
But this only works for obscure last names or unusual TLDs. There's also the issue of family relationships - people get divorced, grow up and want more independence, etc. Marrying email to a family domain could be messy.
I do exactly that, bertjw@regeer.org. I've set up accounts for everyone else in the family, but most if not all just have it set up as a forwarder to another gmail account.
If so, that's a huge bummer. I only recently switched to running my email this way and I don't relish the thought of migrating elsewhere so soon.
I would happily pay $50/year (or perhaps more... I don't know how high I'd go) for email that's not only convenient and spam free, but also well protected from governments and the provider's employees, and not data mined.
I have absolutely no use for phone support or 99.9 uptime for my personal email. So the businessification of Google mail is not a win for me. Privacy and convenience or what I'm after.
Anyone working on something like this?