Google later relented somewhat and offered a vague escape hatch option, promising that someday these 'Legacy G Suite' users could port their data and purchases to a free consumer Gmail account-with the caveat that Google won't host their custom-domain email anymore. These people are in deep, with all data, emails, and purchases stored on these accounts, and it feels like data extortion to suddenly tell them to pay up or lose everything.

It's an unfair rug pull for users who set up a free account years ago with no warning that Google might eventually charge for it. From 2006 to 2012, users could make a free Google Apps/G Suite account with a custom domain, so their email ended with a domain they owned, instead of In January, Google announced a significant policy change and told these users they needed to start paying the standard business rate for their Google accounts or face an account shutdown.

In the early days of Google's business-focused productivity service-first called 'Google Apps for Your Domain' then 'G Suite' and now 'Google Workspace'-Google offered domain-branded Google 'business' accounts for free. Some longtime Google users are facing a rough transition.

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