Canceling the free trial of Google Apps now disables email service | Hacker News Reader

Canceling the free trial of Google Apps now disables email service

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47 pointsantichaos23 comments

I have a few applications running on App Engine and am using Google Apps to connect domains and do business e-mail. I've had these apps for over 2 years now and they are my livelihood. I'm a Passive Income Hacker.

When App Engine and Google Apps made their debut, I poured hours into learning them. I evangelized them to other developers and balked at the idea of vendor lock-in affecting me. I knew that Google's "Do no evil" mantra was probably hyperbole, but I figured they couldn't be worse than Microsoft.

I COMPLETELY regret using App Engine and building a business based on Google technologies. I will not make the same mistake again. Since I have launched my apps, Google has

1. Completely changed the App Engine pricing model from one based on CPU time to datastore writes.

2. Deprecated their first attempt at a datastore and replaced it with one that costs 3x as much (called HRD). There's lots of reports of people having problems with their migration tools.

3. Created a $500/mo support plan that you need in order to get any sort of help from their engineers--even when you have a disruption localized to your environment.

4. Deprecated the ability to write to the Blobstore using an experimental API - However the API was experimental for 3 or 4 years, so a lot of people grew to depend on it.

5. Removed the ability to associate a domain with your app engine account for free through Google Apps. Now you have to pay $50/year or $5/month and you get an app engine credit you may or may not use.

6. Have taken away e-mail quota for new applications so you can only send 100 e-mails a day and you have to file a support request if you want to ramp it up. You may or may not be allowed.

7. Forced users to upgrade their MapReduce version to a new one which uses a completely different API and requires significant code rewrites.

8. Maintained a "take it or leave it" attitude with an iron fist.

When I started with App Engine. I bought into the idea that I'd have them take care of the infrastructure and I could "sit back and scale out." I've had to put so much work into maintaining my apps because of their infrastructural changes it's ridiculous. If I would have just gone with a VPS or EC2, I might have had to replicate a database and write some scripts to automate backups, but at least I would've been able to decide if I wanted to change my code or not. With App Engine, I've been completely at Google's mercy. All that, and NO database joins :-(

Deprecating API's with repeated warnings and a long wind down period is perfectly acceptable. You were able to use the old Datastore & Blobstore for what, years?

The $500/mo support plan is comparable to Amazon EC2.

The email quotas and free tier in general were very generous, I don't understand the complaint that you can "only" send 100 e-mails for free - Amazon SES, Sendgrid, and all the others have similar limits in place. Emails cost fractions of pennies to send and its a simple API or SMTP, you can switch to any of the other providers. Bing to find one that gives you 12k transactional emails for free. :0)

I agree the pricing changes shakeout came as an unpleasant surprise, but there's no free lunch. At least its a profitable/viable product now and won't be killed like Reader, I'm actually happy for that long term.

Another major problem I have with the Datastore deprecation is the precedent it set. Datastore was a GA feature AFAIK. So, there's no real distinction between GA and experimental now. If something doesn't work out for Google, experimental or not, they're going to can it--that's the message they sent. They should've grandfathered people over and just bit the bullet. Maybe come up with a rule like: if you don't write to the old Datastore for 90 days, you never get it again.

With that being said, long grace periods don't matter when you've got a terabyte of data in that thing--For me and a lot of developers, it's going to be risky business to migrate from Datastore to HRD, and I dread it. I'm not paying them to dread their infrastructural issues. No. That's the opposite of what I'm paying them for.

The problem with at first having practically unlimited e-mail and then the new restriction is it limits the type of apps you can build without their permission. I understand the need to protect against misuse, but you'd think they would've gotten it right from day one since they manage the largest e-mail service on the planet.

I don't know if you were there during the early days or not, but one of their strengths was support was very accessible. You could write about an issue on the newsgroup and an engineer would contact you personally, go into your app, unstuck your indexes or whatever. Going from that level of service to $500/mo once you're hooked stinks. It's the old bait and switch all the way.

Quick aside, "Passive Income Hacker" is a great turn of phrase, something that could maybe have a brand built around it. Apparently someone else agreed, the .com was snatched up sometime in the last two hours.

lol - no kidding

Totally agree with the sentiment, but just a minor nitpick. You can still get a free Google Apps account for a domain name BUT you have to go through the App Engine admin console to do it. In Application Settings>Add Domain there is a "Signup for Google Apps" link that will let you create a single user account for free.

They make you jump through hoops to get it!

No - they changed this. See this post:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/google-appengine/...

Looking at one of the responses, the user might have cancelled their service instead of downgrading back to the free plan.

http://productforums.google.com/d/msg/apps/tevkcnsb7-w/CQkhb...

You only get one option when you 'cancel' the trial. This is exactly what they told me - it's a lie.

As far as I can tell there no longer is a "downgrade" option.

Edit: I just checked. If you've created a Google Apps account recently then there no longer is the option to down grade. If you had an existing free Google Apps account it will remain free.

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/changes-to-g...

This happened to me. THE TRIAL IS A TRAP!

Seriously, do NOT test this out unless you want to be put on the paid version of Google Apps. It's completely underhanded and false ... they will feed you some rubbish about how you 'cancelled your account' instead of stopping the trial and that they can't do anything to help.

I repeat: THE TRIAL IS A TRAP

Do no evil my arse ...

I should add that I have no issue with paying for services - even being forced OFF free services with appropriate notice. But this is deceptive, plain and simple.

The "downgrade" option that used to be there is gone. When I click on "Billing" on the dashboard I get:

  Cancel Google Apps for Business

  Your subscription to Google Apps for Business will be cancelled immediately, and all user data will be deleted. You cannot undo this process.

This doesn't sound like a 24 disruption to me. So far I haven't been able to find the down grade option.

Nice one Google! (not)

Thank you for posting this. I'm not using it for anything critical but this would have been very annoying.

I'm pretty sure this was discovered back in December

"Google Apps Authorized Reseller"? WTF?

Hmm. Apparently it's legit: http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/landing/partn...

This usually means you're a third party firm that helps the transition to Apps, support, change management, custom integration work, etc. You can also own the billing, so a company pays you, and you pay Google. In return, you typically provide ongoing support to the company. I think there's also a portal to help manage your customers' Apps configuration.

Relatedly, I used to be a Google Apps Certified Deployment Specialist. http://certification.googleapps.com/Home/overview

Can someone explain why this is an issue? To me, this sounds like:

"I cancelled x, why am I still not getting x service?"

There are lots of people with Google Apps free accounts. You're able to try out the paid level of service, but downgrading back to the free plan again disables your e-mail entirely for up to 24 hours.

Not meaning to sounds trite, but you get what you pay for. If you are building your business around a service that you're not paying for and has no contractual service level agreement, you are setting yourself up to get screwed.

It would be like leasing retail space on a handshake instead of a formal lease agreement, and then being surprised when the landlord tells you you have to move because he's now got another strategy for that property.

Trial ends. You don't want to pay. But the service should still continue?

And this is one of the top stories on Hackers News?

These are users on the free tier. They try the paid tier (free trial for 30 days), which definitely doesn't give any indication that deciding not to stick with the paid level will disable your company's e-mail for a day.

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