Google Won’t Shut Down Your Legacy G Suite Account After All

Google lastly released a service for individuals with “tradition” G Suite Google accounts. After at first threatening to close down totally free G Suite accounts if users didn’t begin spending for the service, Google has actually totally withdrawed. When users leap through some sign-up hoops, Google will permit their ~16- year-old accounts to continue working. You’ll even get to keep your e-mail address.

The legend up until now, if you have not been following, is that Google has a custom-domain user account service, presently called “Google Workspace” and formerly called “G Suite” and “Google Apps.” The service is primarily a regular Google account that lets you utilize an e-mail that ends in your custom-made domain instead of “@gmail. com.” Today this service is focused on organizations and expenses cash every month, however that was not constantly the case. From 2006 to 2012, custom-made domain Google accounts were complimentary and were even pitched at households as a geeky method to have an online Google identity.

In January, some treasurer at Google obviously observed this small group of long time users was technically getting a paid service totally free and chose this was undesirable. Google published a statement in January stating these individuals “Legacy G Suite users” and generally informed them, “Pay up or lose your account.” These users registered for a complimentary Google service and kept information on it for as long as 16 years, and there were no indicators it would ever be charged. Google held this decade-plus of user information captive, informing users to begin paying service rates for Workspace or deal with an account shutdown.

A week later on, after the inescapable public protest, Google relented rather and stated slightly that it would ultimately supply “a choice for you to move your non-Google Workspace paid material and the majority of your information to a no-cost alternative.” Stating you’ll have the ability to keep “the majority of your information” that you’ve been building up for 16 years is a rather disconcerting declaration. Google’s one little bit of specifics in January was that “this brand-new choice will not consist of premium functions like custom-made e-mail,” so you ‘d need to stop hosting your e-mail with Google, and you ‘d most likely need to go through some wild Google account conversion procedure. It then let these users anxiously flap in the wind, without any more information, for 6 months.

How to Save Your Free G Suite Account

In May, Google lastly informed these users what would occur to their accounts. The brand-new assistance page states, “For people and households utilizing your represent non-commercial functions, you can continue utilizing the G Suite tradition complimentary edition and pull out of the shift to Google Workspace.” The link for that is here or in your G Suite admin panel. You’ll require to validate that your G Suite account is for individual usage, and not company usage, due to the fact that organizations are still anticipated to spend for Workspace. If you currently bent to Google’s will and began spending for Workspace since of the January statement, Google states you must get in touch with assistance.

The greatest news from this newest statement is that Google has actually chosen versus taking individuals’s custom-made e-mail away. A 2nd assistance page states, “You can continue utilizing your customized domain with Gmail, maintain access to no-cost Google services such as Google Drive and Google Meet, and keep your purchases and information.” It now seems like there will be no modifications to your account, supplied you click through the “self-transition” screen prior to the due date.

The due date to pull out of an account shutdown, which has actually altered a number of times now, is June 27,2022 If you do not finish this opt-out by June 27, you will be immediately billed for Workspace. If you do not have a card on file and do not pull out, your account will be suspended on August 1 and closed down.

The automated registration and billing, without specific user approval, is among the wilder parts of this story. If you do not carefully follow the tech news scene, there’s a great chance you will not understand this is coming, and you will either all of a sudden be billed without your permission or discover that your Google account has actually unexpectedly quit working.

For a business whose essential organization pillar is encouraging users to save large quantities of information on its servers, playing video games like this is an unusual choice. A minimum of it pertained to an affordable conclusion.

This story initially appeared on Ars Technica