I am old enough to remember that Microsoft also had a similar free email product for custom domains called Microsoft live mail or something like that. In fact, you can still find articles on the internet about how to move from Microsoft to Google workspaces when Microsoft killed their free product.
I think even the users of this product knew that email with custom domain is a premium product that pretty much no email provider provides for free. I am still surprised that they let it run for 10+ years.
I dread the reaction on HN when Google finally decides to kill Google voice , which is another very popular but free Google service. In fact I am sure that running Google voice is even more expensive to run than workspaces because just the cost of assigning a phone number is some fractions of a dollar to the FCC.
The frustrating thing is I think many of us would be perfectly happy paying for a custom domain in plain old regular gmail, but $6 per month per user is waaaay too expensive when all we care about is email.
Zoho has a lite email plan for $12 per year per user. I can put my whole 6 user domain on Zoho for the same price as a single Google Workspace user and the loss of things like Google Drive aren't really a loss in my opinion because I don't trust Google enough to use them.
The $6 per user per month price point is pretty high for users that want basic email.
Your ProtonMail account most likely includes access to ProtonDrive. Proton's services are also encrypted at rest. So for cheaper, you support a company fighting for user privacy. $72 for GMail is unreasonable considering you are also the product by merely hosting your data with Google.
Regarding Google voice, voip.ms is lining up the features to replace that (sms/mms/voice transcription/forwarding/etc.). For $20 (paid to google) they will release your GV number so you can port it to voip.ms, and then you pay as you go there.
I still have an old Exchange Friends & Family thing that a buddy working for MS set me up with ~14 years ago; I just pay for the domain and set up some DNS records at that time. I haven't really used it for anything, but checked now and it still works, though appears to be half-broken once you venture beyond email & calendar (presuming the SKU is long gone so they did a half-ass migration to something at some point).
I loaded up $10 a few years ago just in case I ever needed to pay for a Voice call, and it has dropped a whopping $0.02 from one 23 second outbound international call. It’s great that it’s a free service for domestic calls.
in the spirit of never touching a google product again, I'm planning to use mysudo instead of voice. Might be worth a look? It allows you to create up to 8 identities with different numbers.
I think even the users of this product knew that email with custom domain is a premium product that pretty much no email provider provides for free. I am still surprised that they let it run for 10+ years.
I dread the reaction on HN when Google finally decides to kill Google voice , which is another very popular but free Google service. In fact I am sure that running Google voice is even more expensive to run than workspaces because just the cost of assigning a phone number is some fractions of a dollar to the FCC.