At this point, in my case as a single user with a custom domain, I can’t think of a good reason to leave Google.
The value proposition for converting G Suite Legacy free edition to Google Workspace Business Starter Edition, as I understand, is:
- Continued free until August 2022
- Then the cost increases from nothing to $3/user/month until August 2023 when it goes up to $6/user/month
- No reductions in service, i.e., you get to keep Google Voice, Google Photos and all the rest of the G Suite Legacy apps, e.g., Gmail, Calendar, Contacts, etc.
- Storage doubles (from 15GB to 30GB per user)
- Support improves from none to 24/7 with 4-hour service-level objective for P1 cases plus 99.9% uptime SLA
- No need to export data from Google and import it somewhere else
And what is the cost of an alternative for email with a custom domain? I hear a lot of people recommending FastMail which offers:
- First custom-domain account (with 30GB of storage) for $5/user/month
- Additional users on the same domain (with only 2GB of storage each) for $3/user/month
- Fewer services, e.g., no VOIP, etc.
It is both cheaper and less hassle to stay with Google until August 2023, right?
I hear people being unhappy with Google’s targeted advertising and tracking. For whatever reason, I haven’t had any ads on the web interface of G Suite Legacy for at least a decade. (I think that they are thwarted by some CSS installed a long time ago.) In any case, there are no Google ads when used through client software such as Apple Mail. As for tracking, isn’t this really a function of using the web interface? Isn’t it the browser and your ISP that’s doing the tracking; aren’t your browser and ISP going to track you just the same if you use the web interface to another provider, including FastMail?
Some people complain about Google scanning your content. But don’t (almost) all email providers store your mail as plain text and scan your mail store? How else can they index your mail so that you can do server-side searches? Do you really prefer to search your mail with Apple Mail, for example, rather than Google’s search engine? Moreover, I really like Google’s server-side filters to label my mail, i.e., automatically put it into folders, because they give me the same view on all my devices. What’s more, server-side rules that forward mail to others fire without waiting for me to download mail to my client.
But really, how much is targeting advertising, tracking, and scanning really bothering you? It apparently wasn’t a problem as long as G Suite didn’t charge a fee. It’s only a concern now because Google raised the price from free to $3/user/month for the coming year, right? The issue isn’t privacy per se; it’s just the price of your privacy.
What am I missing? Isn’t it a no-brainer to stay with Google for at least a year?