Google’s cost-free legacy G suite has been available for personal use for a while now. However, they’ve been considering making it not-so-free for the last few months. When they announced this decision to the public, informing free users that they would have to start paying or stop using the service, you can imagine how unhappy that made people.
The History of G Suite
To better understand the whole story, let’s backtrack a little to 2006. When Google G Suite first came out, it was described as a business productivity app. It offered things like shared calendars, business emails, video meetings, and more.
Over the years, the development teams at Google continued adding features and services. In 2020 they rebranded some of their online productivity resources as “Google Workspace”, though it’s still more commonly referred to as Google G Suite. Many businesses got to be free users, which made it even more enticing.
It started free for businesses and soon became available for free personal use. Despite seeming very confident in recent months that they were going to start charging these individual users, nothing was set in stone, and they have decided against it — at least for now.
G Suite for Businesses will No Longer be Free as of June 27, 2022
However, reports are going around that business accounts on Google G suite will no longer have free access after June 27, 2022. People will have until then to pick a transition path. No matter what, you will still be able to use your custom domain as things currently stand.
Google also stated that you’ll be able to retain access to no-cost Google services and keep prior purchases and data. The free versions of Google Workspace services will still be available, including Google Drive, Google Maps, and Youtube.
Any movies, games, etc., purchased previously through Google Play will also still be available. For these things to work, you will be expected to verify that you intend to use them for personal reasons only, not in any commercial context.
While Google’s vague and uncertain descriptions of what they have in store for the future of Google G Suite are a bit off-puting to users, many still enjoy and find value in its services. For this reason, it’s unlikely that they will lose enough consumers to remove it altogether. Still, the number of people using it may take a hit for a while.
Despite Google being vague about what’s in store for the future of Google’s G Suite, cloudHQ is not vague. We proudly offer you over 50 email productivity tools that work directly within Gmail and Google Workspace’s G Suite. They all have either a free trial, or are simply free to use. Please find them here and enjoy being more productive with your time.