Google is making AI in Gmail and Docs free, but raising the price of Workspace
(theverge.com)330 points by lars_francke 3 days ago
330 points by lars_francke 3 days ago
Investors are the customer, so they are pandering to them by shoving AI into everything regardless of resulting enshittification. Foie gras AI for the stock price.
I can't be alone in not wanting these features? I don't mind them being available, but I do fear a nearterm future where they are active whether I ask them to be or not.
I remember all of the scorn clippy got years ago. How is this any different? I think Inbox was probably more useful, and they didn't push it near this hard. :(
> How is this any different?
It's worse, because Clippy had no editorial control of what was being produced.
I think there's a group of people who really really want this, and they are probably the last people who should get access to an AI/LLM. Some people will just love this, because they're already bullshitting their way through life and this will just make it easier, it even looks company approved if it's in the tools provided to you.
I’m on paid Google Workspace for my one-man business : I paid for a month of the separate AI add-on but I stupidly agreed to an “annual commitment” which means that, even though I don’t use the AI stuff (it’s not particularly useful) I have to keep paying for it every month for a whole year! :-(
Anybody know if this means they’ll let me off my annual commitment now that it’s included in the base price?
> If you previously purchased Gemini for Google Workspace, you won't be charged for it after January 31, 2025.
See https://support.google.com/a/answer/15400543#zippy=%2Cwhats-...
Yeah fair point - I think I’m just scarred from experiences of interacting with Google “support” over the years!
We have Workspace with Gemini and I haven't yet found a case where it did something useful for me.
The times that I had it try to find information in my gDrive folders it didn't find what I wanted, and I ended up using search as usual. It was also slower than me searching and looking through the docs.
For small startups, what are some good alternatives to Workspace?
I use workspace due to familiarity with Gmail, and no other reason. Would love to know some cheap/easy alternatives.
Free, nothing worth writing home about. Technically you can do this for free with an Apple account but its a total mess of a system and incredibly buggy, not to mention essentially no spam filtering.
Paid you've got ProtonMail and FastMail, both decent options.
Thanks. Just had a quick look at both. Proton is 6.99 euro/user/month and fastmail is similar (9 aud/user/month). Vaguely similar pricing to Google workspace.
This can add up quickly if you’re the kinda person who flings together an experimental site and lets it run its course. For example say 3 emails per site (info@, no-reply@, and your-name@) and 10 various small sites per year.. starts to add up.
Would be awesome if there were an alternative that you pay, say $10, and get as many email addresses as you can be bothered to set up.
I have absolutely no clue how the underlying economics of email services work, so I presume what I’m hoping for isn’t feasible.
I know someone else already mentioned about user != email address. But in the situation you mentioned I tend to use cloudflare and have that do a catchall on the domain for side projects and forward it over to my main account. I have a generic name I launch all my sideprojects under to cover this.
Hey is another good paid option.
I've used Apple Mail for years (in addition to gMail). Never had any problems with it. Don't seem to get more spam there than I do with gMail.
Proton has a pretty good suite of tools for a similar price.
iCloud Mail (if you have paid iCloud...) is free to add custom domains.
My understanding is that every manager at Google has had one of their quarterly goals be to integrate genAI into their team's product (regardless of whether it makes sense to) for the past several years already, so you're not wrong.
I don't like AI being used in anything remotely creative.
I don't draw, not well, but I write, slightly better. I occasionally ask WordPress to have its AI generate a little blurb for me, and always wind up deleting it. It takes something I can't really describe, my voice I guess, and sucks it out. It homogenizes my writing to try to make it fit some bland ideal. I imagine to those more keen on art than I, AI art is similarly off.
And yes, stories are not the primary use of Gmail. But in business, words matter, and two seemingly synonymous words can be quite different, and two words that seem opposite may not be. I have a friend who teaches law, and they mentioned it was quite easy to tell which students cheated on one particular assignment discussing contracts. If I recall right, material contracts are a type of contract, and AI made up immaterial contracts.
While this mistake would hopefully be obvious, other mixups might not be, with potentially serious consequences.
> If I recall right, material contracts are a type of contract, and AI made up immaterial contracts.
Fun fact, a rogue LLM impersonating a human in the 17th century is also how we got the term "imaginary" numbers. It also wrote some truly terrible philosophy but it started with a pithy sentence so everyone remembers it.
It’s time saas apps realise that they can’t make 2.5x normal license money by just sticking AI to it.
In our SaaS we added it for free. We realised that there is no way to sustainably make money off of this in long term.
It’s a great feature but not 2.5x price worth feature.
Sounds like a terrible tradeoff
I can't wait for the LLM hype train to die
Not gonna happen.
"I can't wait for the PC hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the internet hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the smartphone hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the EV hype train to die"
I suggest you don't wait too long.
"I can't wait for the Laser Disc hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the Betamax hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the HD-DVD hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the NFT hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the dogecoin hype train to die"
Anyone that relates GenAI's importance to that of the Internet must not have been around when the WWW actually launched.
"Internet" was not the killer app, email and instant messaging were. Email was free through your ISP and didn't require more than a $9.99/mo Earthlink connection. The alternative was Fax / Telex etc that had zero network effect outside of businesses and required a dedicated phone line and hardware.
LLM based GenAI on the other hand has been around for long enough that we know that it's main use case is limited to helping schoolkids cheat on their essays and polluting the Internet with factory-farmed social media "content".
Anyone relating LLMs to school kids cheating hasn't seen programmers be 3x as fast using it and journalists churning out articles 3x as fast by focusing on what they do best (gather and sort facts) and leaving the tedious make-easily-readable text writing to a machine.
One can certainly have opinions about how some people use it and how they check the quality of what comes out, but as long as it's not used to make up facts but merely to do the primitive busy work, like machines are supposed to do, I don't see how that's not just as revolutionizing as the fax/telex comparison you are giving.
> LLM based GenAI on the other hand has been around for long enough that we know that it's main use case is limited to [...]
Sounds exactly like what Bill Gates said in the early days of the internet. I don't have the exact quote, but I'm sure typing half a sentence full of grammar and spelling errors into ChatGPT would give me the quote including a link to its source. I should got get it fast before that tool disappears when the hype is over and we are back to old school google searches, like God intended.
> Not gonna happen.
I’ve had insight into a bunch of businesses in multiple industries putting stupid money into trying to find a use for this, caught up in the hype and worried about falling behind. While also being sold AI features by every vendor, who’re all doing the exact same thing.
Every single one is floundering and very unlikely to think this was a good use of resources a couple years from now.
LLMs and associated tech are here to stay, just like search algorithms and autocomplete and machine translation programs, and the clone tool. The hype will fade, though. They’re neat tools but, no, turns out we’re not on the verge of inventing Skynet, we just fooled people into thinking we were because a prominent hype-man/grifter was saying so as a sales tactic (Altman) and because the output is human language instead of numbers or whatever.
This is annoying and badly done IMO. I also don't like or need the features and wouldn't pay for them if I didn't have to.
That said, what you get from Google for a few dollars / month is so far over and above any other SaaS that I'm happy to keep paying (and paying more).
I'd rather Google fix the calender integration in Gmail first.
I used to get automatically created calender events from Gmail for hotels, flights, etc. This was really nice.
But somehow it stopped working well recently. Some emails were not regonized at all (booking.com). Some flight emails are missing return flight.
In google economics, there is no KPI incentive for fixing bugs and huge KPI incentives for monetising a new moonshot product nobody wants.
I'd like this bug fixed too. The quickest path would be to make a bounty hunt website for Googlers to fix things in their free time and push through monrepo approvals legally.
Or, get hired, fix it, and resign.
I'm honestly getting a bit sick of subscription pricing, especially for things like "productivity apps." and G-Suite (although sadly the MS alternative isn't any better).
At the end of the day, we just do the same ol' simple word processing we've done for the last 20 years.
Are there good corporate email alternatives that just do email/calendars and do them well with business-type SLAs? Zoho? FastMail?
In my experience, FastMail has better uptime than any of the stuff work relies on. (It feels like one more nine, but I haven’t checked.)
Maybe you could have them randomly suspend your accounts for a few hours here and there to match the public cloud experience. :-)
Edit: Here’s their outage page, which reports > 2-3 nines for most subsystems most months:
Note that they treat any service degradation as downtime when computing 9’s. For instance, they had one imap server down today, which meant some requests were failing, and that counts against their reported numbers.
By this metric: “One machine is failing requests”, most of the hyperscalers are down all the time.
Regarding actual SLAs with money and stuff: How much is the refund worth vs. the cost of downtime?
Edit 2: Take github for example. They have unreported outages all the freaking time. Down detector says push/pull has been flaky for the last 24 hours, but the official status page says all systems operational, with a minor codespace outage yesterday.
Compare:
To:
https://downdetector.com/status/github/
To prove those aren’t all false reports, next time they go offline for you, go bask in the green light their status page.
Zoho’s SLA I can’t speak to but it’s hard to argue against free forever, including custom domains. For personal use it’s perfect and the paid packages are much better value for money than Google/Microsoft.
FastMail is wonderfully competent at being an email provider, has human support (or advanced enough an AI to fool me) and wildcard domains.
> Are there good corporate email alternatives that just do email/calendars and do them well with business-type SLAs? Zoho? FastMail?
There are literally tons of them.
We've got a massive communications problem in our society, people do not know how to express efficiently, they under and over document, but rarely document "just so" one can use whatever, understand whatever, without a majority of the information exchange being throw away "wrapping" information, framing information.
LLM AIs are forcing this issue to an apex, if and only if you and your peers realize this working with LLMs is also a communications issue, also one of framing information so both the correct information is delivered and a minimum of wrapping information that needs to be filtered through to understand is not delivered. The same reason you cannot explain to your boss, or coworker, or spouse some troublesome issue preventing a goal is also why you cannot get the quality replies you want from an LLM. You cannot express you request, your information effectively so the audience can understand what you meant.
One thing I really loved is automated transcripts on youtube. I love watching youtube videos, but sometimes I want to remember where I heard some statement, so I can just copy paste the entire transcript and do ctrl+f on it.
So sad that they removed this feature. There is third party websites offering it, but I'd prefer it on the main site.
This feature had been added years ago, way before the AI hype was as big as it is now (but it's always been using deep learning models).
The transcript is still there, yt just made it harder to find.
On the video description (the text under the video) click 'Show more'. Scroll to the bottom -> 'Show Transcript' -> it will appear to the right of the video (and you can use ctrl + f on it).
IME this works for ~90% of yt videos (i.e. most, but not all).
Note that yt being frustratingly juvenile, symbols are put in place of words yt considers swear words (this caught me out a few times when using ctrl + f to find sentence that contained a swear word or homonym of a swear word).
I believe with the YouTube extension enabled for Gemini you could provide it a YouTube link and ask questions on the transcript
This is how every big tech works. Leech onto high priority projects and call it "impact"
At Google even if you aren't trying to make money, you can get preferred placement in search for some project to boost user numbers and reach. I always worried it made teams complacent about actually making a good product people wanted, but it was hard to resist.
Apple iCloud. I still run on google suite, but I want to move away from it because reasons.
Apple has reasonable web versions for documents, excel, note taking for when you are not on your iDevice. It has a calendar and provides email. It also has all my photos and other stuff anyways. It also supports custom domain names.
To see if I could move away from gmail I started using apple mail, connected to gmail still. The app is just fine.
I just need to make time to do the migration.
> [Billing and Service Notice] Google Workspace service and pricing updates
> Dear administrator,
> Starting today, your Google Workspace subscription includes new AI features designed to help your users improve their productivity and innovation. With these changes, we will also be updating subscription pricing starting March 17, 2025.
> ...
> These features were previously available only to users with a Gemini for Google Workspace Add-on, but now will be included with Google Workspace Business Standard plans. You will see these features added to your subscription in the coming weeks. Soon, you'll get access to even more Gemini features in your Google Workspace apps.
> Review the Google Workspace blog announcement to learn more about these changes.
> Starting March 17, 2025*, your Google Workspace Business Standard subscription price will be automatically updated to $14.00 per user, per month with an Annual/Fixed-Term Plan (or $16.80 if you have a monthly Flexible Plan).
So we don’t want to use this, but there is no way to opt out and we still have to pay X extra per user :-/
The FAQ does clarify that opt-outs are available for the functionality itself, but not for the pricing change.
(Disclaimer: Although I have worked for Google in the past, that ended almost a decade ago and wasn't in any role related to pricing or product decisions about Google Workspace. I have no inside info on this announcement and am not speaking for Google here.)
Sure, but they use the “AI is now available to everyone” to justify the price increase.
Opting out of the functionality I don’t need is not particularly useful (I won’t use it anyway) but the thing is I will be charged for it anyway.
I'm certainly not a fan of the decision either.
In those countries where MS has now bundled Copilot Pro into Microsoft 365 Personal and Family Plans - not the US yet, so far only a few APAC countries like Australia and Singapore - it's still possible to get a "Classic" version of the subscription at the old price and feature set, but only via the cancellation screen, not otherwise advertised. I wonder, but certainly do not know, if Google has similar plans.
I'm not convinced the "Gemini all the things" strategy was the right move with Workspace, they rolled it out so fast which indicates that UX research was likely rushed or bypassed completely. Had they conducted their typical extensive UXR process they would have discovered that the features are not very useful being baked into the suite.
Now where I do think there is opportunity is in building out the standalone Gemini app, as ChatGPT has proven with their Teams product that there is business value in having a dedicated chat UI for your business. We are currently subscribed to ChatGPT for Teams and use it every day across product and engineering, there isn't a need for it to be integrated directly into our productivity suite UX, but pulling data out from the suite (e.g Google Drive) into the chat UI is helpful. Organizing project folders, custom GPTs etc also hold value for us.
Okay, I have a lot of projects with a couple of email addresses attached to their domain name
In the US and European market, this was seen as a bare minimum level of professionalism and validation (other markets are more advanced on this front and have been on chat apps for the entire business for at least a decade)
regardless for email, I had been using Google workplaces for this
What’s a cheaper alternative? last time I tried something else I found I was vendor locked to google even when trying to accept calendar invites from people in other organizations that sent google calendar. That was 5 years ago though
some sectors like web3 let you do the whole project with just a username on discord/telegram/x but I do want to consider migrating my emails away from google workspace now. Its difficult to manage even changing the credit cards on file with so many projects like if one expires
Migadu is cheap and works well for email only.
If you need email + shared calendar/contact the email service from infomaniak should do the trick. If you need functionalities close to workspace with storage, office suite, videocall they have the ksuite service.
I clicked the button to turn the forced AI crap off today in Gsuite. It has been on for a day (unasked, forced my google). The engineering team responded with a unanimous thumbs up when I told them. Winner of best response was:
"oh god! now i have to type complete senten..... zzzzzzzz"
I don't think so. If you find otherwise (without any stupid MX/forwarding magic), let me know! Silly that the price keeps going up when I'm basically only using their spam filter.
No idea about Youtube accounts.
One way to send and receive email from your vanity domain in the free version of gmail:
# Use Cloudflare Email Routing.
* Point your MX records at their MX.
* Cloudflare forwards email to your gmail.com address.
* In Gmail Settings: "Add another email address".
* Add your SMTP settings in the new account.
* There is no need to configure IMAP or POP3.It's not good enough. The place I most want it is in Sheets and it doesn't know how to fill in random cells with stuff. It can populate new tables and stuff with example data which is fine as a start but I usually want it to copilot my formulae.
It's such an obvious use case and Claude 3.5 Sonnet can give me the answer if I paste the header and a value row but Gemini is utterly useless.
You're in-app. How is a textual copy-paste better in Claude? Useless Google PM. The Oracle Java of AI.
We signed an annual pricing deal in fall and now our price is going up materially during the annual term because of this change, because we didn't buy Gemini.
I accidentally started the Gemini-the-product free trial in Workspace while trying to find how I could test Gemini-the-model in AI studio.
The first task that I asked for it’s assistance with, was how to disable, cancel or unsubscribe from Gemini-the-product. It repeatedly and confidently made up instructions to adjust settings that didn’t exist in menus that weren’t where it said they were and provided links to irrelevant documentation.
It was either useless, actively misleading or extremely motivated to not be turned off.
Any of those was reason enough not to use it ever again.
It’s not just that I don’t really need the AI features - it’s also that I actively don’t want to participate in adding to Google’s AI training data.
We’ve been happy customers of Workspace for around 16 years - this feels like the straw to break the camel’s back.
Strongly hoping there’ll be enough pushback from nervous corporates about data security that they’ll reconsider.
Already had to migrate all my domain's off Squarespace and remove Google Workspace entirely when they randomly decided it was now not free and started billing me monthly more than Google Domains did (80% more) Some MBA got a bonus for this surely.
I would buy $GOOG stock blindly but being a paid user of theirs blows
Can't you use gmail with any MTA? Have they removed imap support?
Yeah but you're comparing apples and oranges.
No matter how annoying Slack can randomly be, the text chat part is light years ahead of google. You can actually use it to coordinate work, while in a google-using shop you basically must use all other features to get something remotely resembling what you can do with slack. No pinning in google group chats, seriously?
Ofc google offers you the drive and docs. And "AI" now.
Ugh, we got hit by this. We're a non-profit with business plus licenses, so we get a decent discount. I opened a support chat as soon as I got the email about the license changes and price increase. Our contract is due next month, so I need to make sure we're OK budget wise. They can't even tell me how much our renewal will be yet. They don't know.
This morning, I logged on to find that the AI features have been turned on domain-wide for us. I couldn't find any admin controls, so I opened up a support case. The off buttons are locked behind an enterprise subscription. Our end-users need to turn off smart features to disable Gemini. There's no domain-wide / admin level control unless you purchase their most expensive licenses. It's absolutely disgusting. I'm so disappointed with how this was rolled out. We should've been given an opportunity to make an informed and intentional decision about how or if we were going to use these features.
I also built a chrome extension that integrates AI into Gmail and Docs but users are not restricted to just one AI model.
Business are not willing to pay for Google and Microsoft artificial intelligence so they ramp up the price to everyone and everyone get it 'for free'.
Untill they eventually get hooked on that and then google and Microsoft will once again put that behind a paywall, except now everyone pays more. At least that's the plan.
Now even if employee don't see the benefit of the new deep integrated a.i. and business refuse to pay more for a.i., they aren't going to leave anyway because Microsoft is doing just the same as google.
That's either a win for Google and Microsoft, or at least a neutral outcome.
What's a good alternative if you just want company emails for a new startup? Zoho?
Our company has been using zoho since we started almost a decade ago. It's been rock solid. We use their CRM & Accounting (Books) as well and everything's integrated nicely. Also has an easy to use API to glue arbitrary things together & scrape emails, etc.
Why not compete with microsoft by not pushing AI? This allows costs to stay low while making customers happier.
Email is the killer app, and their trying to kill email.
Google can’t charge a premium for a noticeably worse AI product.
That gives a clue of where the money is and what people use more :D
Integration will likely be the biggest growth driver for Gemini, I guess.
i dont' want any of this garbage in my workspace account
If I remember correctly, the Office 365 Copilot thing is more of an upsell rather than an upcharge. Basically, if you didn't want to pay more, you would initiate the cancellation process, and during that you could "downgrade" to the plan that you already had (without copilot as part of it).
Personally, I find that to be especially scummy because it essentially sounds like they are betting on people either not understanding that nuance, or not bothering to deal with it (and subsequently, not using AI, making that venture seem vaguely more profitable)
> Your content is not human reviewed or used for Generative AI model training outside your domain without permission.
https://support.google.com/a/answer/15706919?hl=en-IN
Your statement is not accurate based on the Workspace docs.
How sure are you that you didn't implicitly grant permission somewhere? And that Google won't change the default. Which Google has done before.[1]
"I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further." - Vader.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/01/11/google-st...
New article: Google is being sued for listening in on Home Depot customer support calls to train their systems. [1] They had Home Depot's permission, but not the customers'. That's "wiretapping" in some states.
Google has been extremely clear that Workspace/Cloud customer data is firewalled off and never fed back into the machine. If you're claiming this has changed, can you point me to the source?
there's so much ai everywhere
so i dont wanna pay for it. especially not google, because.. well, im their product.
Pretty simple formula, there simply isn't a market for an $x upcharge on mail and docs, but we have to be part of this latest grift so we'll charge everyone $x - y which is a rounding error. Except it's not. At some point someone is going to admit they have bet the farm on improved auto complete.
We're shutting down workspace accounts this quarter for this exact reason.
Oh no nobody’s buying your ai vaporware, let’s make everyone suffer!