Google's G Suite is no longer free — here are the best alternatives

Google has done it again. After killing free unlimited storage on Google Photos last year, it has announced that G Suite will become a paid-only feature.

As  reported, all free G Suite users will be automatically upgraded to a premium plan from May 1. If the company doesn’t have your payment details, you need to update your account by July 1 — or face a shutdown. You can learn more about this on this .

G Suite’s free offering was godsend for bloggers or small-time website owners who could just own a domain name, and use email (and other services) for no cost.

Pay Google

Microsoft

The Seattle-based tech giant can offer you . This will get you access to a 50GB inbox with an option to use your own domain name for it. Plus, you’ll get web and mobile versions of Office apps, and 1TB OneDrive storage.

Zoho

If you’re looking for something free, Zoho’s email service is the closest you can get. It offers email hosting for a single domain for no cost, but comes with 5GB/user and 25MB attachment limits.

Rackspace

This US-based company offers email hosting for custom domains for a starting price of $2.99 per month. However, for $3.99 per month, you can get 30GB of storage and ActiveSync across all the apps.

You can check out the plans .

Other cheap email hosting services

• : Costs less than $1 per month for a single email box
• : The domain hosting service also provides professional email services at the starting price of $1.99.
• : This service lets you pick a domain name and packs five email accounts with that for for the first year
• : This Germany-based service is offering email domain hosting for €1 ($1.13) per month for an annual plan

People are mad at Google for good reason

Unsurprisingly, people are mad. But it’s probably not for the reason you think. The issue that’s cropping up most isn’t about cost, rather the fact Google is providing no way to migrate G Suite users to a personal Gmail account. Here are a selection of tweets about the issue:

. charging legacy users isn’t an issue, but they provide no way to migrate/merge Legacy GSuite free accounts to personal accounts – rendering many families & individuals who got in early with domain name stuck in limbo with apps/calendars on the old accounts.😒

— Alex Hansford (@alexhansford)

13 years of for me and my family and now they’re killing it. should at least offer a decent way to migrate away to a standard account including purchases.

— Samuel Lockhart (@LloydGSR)

So, I can create a new @ gmail .com address.
Download all my old email.
Upload it to the new address.
Set up mail forwarding with my domain.
Add the DMARC/SPF/DKIM so gmail can send as my domain.
Should work.
Pity Google didn’t implement that as a 1-click solution!

— Terence Eden (@edent)

Fucks sake. I’ve got a couple email addresses and YouTube accounts on legacy GSuite, and I have no intention of financially rewarding google for this bullshit. Email seems easy enough to migrate but YouTube…? Ouch.

— luna 💙 (@lunasorcery)

If had my primary email’s life hanging by a thread, I’d react in the same way.

Hopefully, Google listens to users and bashes out a solution before July 1. But given its track record, I am not optimistic.