net: Argh Google Workspace Price increases keep coming

Wow, they’ve been jacking up prices by 20% in their latest round, we started with Business Standard which was $12 and now it is $14.40, so they keep ratcheting the price up. It gives you 2TB/user and Shared Drives and many other things I’ve forgotten (150 vs 100 participants in a video meeting). Personally, for a small company, I find shared drives (and workspaces pretty confusing), but it makes sense if you have real corporate data. The main issue is that navigation between Shared Drives, My Drive, and Workspaces is confusing. It is like having three separate file systems.

There was a day when Gsuite was cheaper, but they’ve matched the Microsoft 365 prices, so the main reason to stay with google are the collaboration features, not for pricing. And in some ways Microsft 365 Business Standard is better because it gives you Microsoft Office for free. The main reason has to do with Google apps vs Microsoft apps

The other thing you lose is enterprise-wide search (which makes sense since Google Drives is gone, but I couldn’t figure that out anyway).

As another aside, one way to reduce costs for infrequent users is to do email forwarding so people can use email but don’t have Google Drive storage.

So the main pain is that going back to their starter version at $7.20/month, we have to move all the Shared Drive stuff out to a user. The main advantage of a shared drive is that no one owns it, but you can achieve the same effect by having an admin account and sticking it there.

So we are off to do a file reorg where we move all the Shared Drive stuff into a Shared folder and then we can shrink to the plan. While you think it doesn’t make a difference, we have 18 users x $14.40 is $259/month but moving back to the other plan is $108 or 4x less.

Might not sound like much but we probably spend as much on OpenAI right now, so money is money.

The main thing you lose is that instead of a total storage of 2TB x users, you get 30GB times the number of users. That’s not a big deal for most folks.

Does make me long for the days when for $6/month you got unlimited storage 🙂