[kwlug-disc] G Suite Free not free anymore

[Mikalai Birukou]

This thread has mentioned fastmail.com. Going on a tangent here, want to 
note their podcast (re: open standards):

https://www.fastmail.com/digitalcitizen/why-open-internet-standards-are-so-important-to-your-future-with-bron-gondwana/


>> I have used Google Apps pretty much since their inception to host my
>> personal domain email.  However as of May Google will not allow free
>> hosting and wants me to pay $7.80/month/user (i have 6).  I'm not really
>> keen on self hosting email (too much upkeep).  What I wonder is how are
>> others hosting their domains and email these days?
>
> Same here. I self-hosted before I moved in 2008, and switched to 
> Google Apps "temporarily" to avoid downtime. It turns out, I didn't 
> miss self hosting.
>
> I'm dealing with three single-user domains, not three users on one 
> domain, because google only allowed the additional domains to be 
> aliases at the time, and that isn't what I wanted.
>
> Since then, Android has come along, so that's the primary login for 
> our phones. So it's not "just" email now.
>
>> One of my biggest concerns is my personal domain account is my primary
>> google account for my android devices.  It is trivial to move my 
>> email but
>> I have concerns regarding losing access to my play store purchases 
>> (apps,
>> movies, books) also will miss nice things like calendar and storage and
>> chat. Google hasn't released many details on this change it seems 
>> like most
>> articles are just speculating.  If anyone has any good sources of info I
>> would welcome them.
>
> All three of us also pay $28/year for additional storage (for 
> photos).  So the google bill will be significant -- $365/year!!!
>
> Curiously, free gmail accounts can share their storage addon as a 
> "Family" -- something we can't do with domain accounts. So we'd only 
> pay $40/year for storage (200GB), rather than $28/user/year (100GBx3).
>
> As you said, moving email is easy (and honestly, calendar/contacts 
> isn't much harder).
>
> Losing app purchases sucks -- but rebuying is significantly less than 
> a one year bill from Google (and a lot of my app purchases are for EOL 
> apps anyway).  I never used their books or movies.
>
> My major, major hangup is photos. Ideally, I'd prefer to use something 
> more privacy-centric for photos, but I just can't get anything close 
> to the convenience of being able to search "Alexis Van" and getting a 
> photo of my wife with a "Mystery Machine" replica at a car show 10 
> years ago.
>
> There also doesn't seem to be a good way to move photos to another 
> account.  I just finished a Google Takeout of my photos (80GB) and 
> will try uploading that into a gmail account to test.
>
>> I don't have a problem paying for email and services but $42 /month 
>> is a little steep.
>
> Ditto. Personally I moved my email to fastmail a few years ago. Just 
> me (not the other two domains), and just email/contacts/calendar (I 
> still use my google account for android, photos, and apps, as 
> mentioned above).
>
> I settled on them because:
>
>     1. They work on open source (Cyrus IMAP) and are trying to get a 
> new     email spec adopted (JMAP). I've used the former, and the 
> latter     sounds interesting.
>
>     2. They support standard protocols -- IMAP, CalDAV, CardDAV, (and 
>     JMAP, if you want to count that).
>
>     3. They don't do ads, or free accounts (They do a free trial     
> though).
>
>     4. They've been doing this longer than gmail existed.
>
> Their pricing isn't exactly stellar though. A basic account is 
> USD$30/year/user. I have more than 2GB of mail, so I'm paying 
> USD$50/year. That's a lot when you consider it's *just* email. But 
> they also only make their money from this, not from data mining and 
> ads... So pick your poison I guess.