Google Warns G Suite Users: Pay or Lose Your Account

Google says the free G Suite service for custom domains has ended. Google has long offered a service that allows you to use Google apps on a custom domain, allowing you to have a Google email address that ends in your domain instead of “gmail.com”. For the first six years of the service’s existence, the base tier allowed you to create a custom domain account for free. Now you need to pay for the privilege of using a custom domain with a Google account. Google disabled the ability to create these accounts for free in 2012, but that wouldn’t take away existing user accounts, would it?

It would be.

As first reported by 9to5Google, Google will terminate free G Suite accounts unless the account holder upgrades to a paid account. Google is sending emails to users of “legacy free G Suite”accounts telling them they have until July 1 to start paying. The support page details how this process will work. Starting May 1, Google will attempt to automatically “upgrade”users to a paid account if it has billing information available. If there is no such information by July, the accounts will be “suspended”. After 60 days, these accounts will lose access to core Google services such as Gmail and Calendar.

Google Personal Domain was launched in 2006 as “Google Apps for Your Domain”. Since then, the name of the service has gone through many changes – “Google Apps for Work”, then “G Suite”and now “Google Workspace”, but the setup has always been the same: you get Gmail and other Google apps, but they were created specifically for your company, which gives them a more professional look than a gmail.com email address. Today, the service starts at $6 per user per month, with higher tiers available for higher storage needs. From 2006 to 2012, the basic tier was free.

Google notes that customers can use Google Takeout to export some data, but if you don’t want to pay, recovering an account under a consumer Google account is a lot of work. These were mostly full-featured Google accounts, and there’s no way to export things like content purchases for books, movies, music, and apps. You will also likely lose your Google Voice number. If you’ve used your G Suite account in this way, you don’t have many options other than to start paying. It would be nice if the company would go the extra mile and offer users an easy way to transfer their data to a free consumer account with a new email address. But Google doesn’t.

If you don’t understand the status of your Google Business Account, try going to the Payments page at admin.google.com. If you see a message saying you’re using an outdated G Suite account, you can expect an email shortly detailing how you’ll be affected by the changes. If you got your Google Apps account through some sort of all-inclusive service, like a domain hosting site, you’ll probably want to check it out.