Comment by seanvelasco

Comment by seanvelasco 3 days ago

17 replies

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I pay for 3 Workspace orgs, and I have Gemini disabled (or still not enabled) on all 3 of them. I'm angry that I'll have to pay more for features I don't use. Gemini should be an add-on cost, not included in the base cost

If they're raising the price of personal GMail, I don't have a problem. But Workspace with hundreds of users, now that's a problem, because it actually hurts my wallet significantly. When this increase comes, I'll have to move elsewhere.

blackeyeblitzar 2 days ago

It’s an anti competitive strategy, which in an ideal world would see them facing a crushing antitrust lawsuit from the FTC and DOJ. What they’re doing is forcing everyone to pay for their AI product. This makes it so that no other company can charge for their alternative AI products. After all, if your company’s spending goes up because of this Google price increase, your executives will not want to see double spending on AI products. So all those deserving smaller companies will miss out on these customers. Google is essentially using this forced price increase to kill their AI competitors by stealing their revenue, through illegal bundling. Just like Microsoft did with Teams to attack Slack illegally.

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bbarnett 3 days ago

With Amazon as an example for CxOs of the world, sadly, this likely won't happen.

Look at Prime. So much crap involved, and quite literally all I use it for is lower cost shipping. It's almost on the edge of not worth it for me. But I bet from Amazon's perspective, they make more with the higher price, even if they lose the bottom 10% not willing to spend.

Huh.

Just made me realise, a startup that subscribes to Prime as a virtual being, and then splits off each sub-thing for full use by separate individuals would be incredibly profitable.

If any form of AI is eventually granted legal personhood, Prime's model will collapse.

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  • add-sub-mul-div 3 days ago

    I've never had Prime and I get free shipping 100% of the time.

    You're not paying for lower cost shipping, you're paying to turn regular purchases you could wait a few extra days for into impulse buys.

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    • bombcar 3 days ago

      Exactly this, and since Covid the 2-day has been about as fast as the “free with $35” option, and waiting encourages thrift anyway.

      I only reactivate it when they give me a week free or for $1 and the additional cash back is worth it.

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    • spaceguillotine 3 days ago

      i cancelled prime over a year ago and i still get packages in the same time frame, i think once they nixed a lot of next day deliveries that it didnt matter anymore.

      The downside is quality of products still keeps going downhill and not even mcmaster had the parts i needed.

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  • makeitdouble 3 days ago

    I was on Prime for years until it lapsed because of a card change, and I realized most of my shipping would still be free:

    - my orders are usually above the generic free shipping threshold

    - most smaller item purchases can be grouped within two or three days to get above the threshold

    - if it's an emergency shipping price won't matter. But I'll also freely choose what service and what retailer to get it from, if a shop is fasteror more reliable than Amazon for instance.

    - Prime day sales aren't great

    Might not apply for your case, but for me getting off of Prime had virtually no impact for the shop part (I was using Prime Video, and Music with Alexa, but I also got rid of both for different reasons)

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    • rr808 3 days ago

      Also every few months I get offered Prime trial free month. Wife too so family wise we get a few months free every year which is more than enough.

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    • jcrawfordor 2 days ago

      I'm sure this depends on where you live, but my Amazon shipments are late such a large portion of the time that they end up refunding most of the shipping costs I pay. It's like free prime for the patient!

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  • navane 3 days ago

    Loosing the people that actually care about the price/reward is a bonus for them, now they have an audience that buys superfluous stuff.

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ra 3 days ago

I agree.

It feels like Google are shoving AI down our throats and making Workspace customers pay for it's development.

I don't want your half-baked LLM features.

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ricardonunez 3 days ago

Right now looking for an alternative for the same reason. Even if it cost me more on labor short term. They have been increasing prices regularly and I’m sure it will continue.

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beretguy 3 days ago

Any idea where you'll move? I have a nonprofit I want to migrate away.

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  • herewulf 3 days ago

    If your mail is extremely low volume, you might like Migadu's low cost plans. They charge by number of messages in/out rather than per domain or something. It's been handy for me for a few lightly used domains including resurrecting one that the previous owner had let expire and then suddenly needed.

    I've kind of been waiting for an excuse to make that move for my solo freelance business. It's probably not enough of a price difference to push me (+$24/year) but it really irks me to be forced into subsidizing this garbage.

    I occasionally do office document stuff which Workspace had been nice for and I can't be bothered with Windows/Office so maybe time to revisit LibreOffice or maybe go full on Emacs.

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    • ycombinatrix 2 days ago

      Can I reject incoming emails, or am I screwed if I get a ton of spam?

      Reply View 0 replies
  • artooro 3 days ago

    I'm considering moving to Fastmail for email and calendar, Sync.com for cloud files. It would be annoying to have separate logins for each though. One nice thing about GWS was a single login for all the apps.

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