Long story.

History

Since 2009, I have been using a Google product called G Suite, which has since been renamed to Google Apps for Domains, and most recently renamed to Google Workspace.

This service was always free, for me, as I signed up before the free-tier was cancelled in December of 2012. I even bought my wife, Jen, a domain and set is up on G Suite before then (neiher of us could remember which year), as we were just dating at the time. In any case, we have both been using our own vanity domain email addresses, using G Suite Gmail for over ten years now.

In the beginning of 2022, Google announced that “G Suite legacy Free edition” would be cancelled on 31 May 2022.

Start The Inventory

I was not angry, really. I’d been using this free service for years, so I also have a lot of data to find and preserve. My wife really only uses the Email and Google Docs services, and most of those docs, she has shared with me, so that is easy to list, as they aren’t different from mine.

I have (this) blog, and Jen has a dormant one that she only posted a few entries on.

Neither of us have ever kept our ONLY copy of a photo or a song in an online service, so we’re choosing to ignore Google Picasa (and I think Google Music already shut down).

So far:

  • Two user’s of email, going back ~13 years
  • Google Drive data / docs
  • Blog(s)
  • And this…

Then it hit me. Our Android phones. I’ve been a G Suite user since before I ever owned my own cell phone (I always had a company issued phone until 2014). Since then, I’d set my own phone directly up using my G Suite email address. Ugh, and my wife has too, since she first got a smart phone. So, real question, what will happen to all my paid apps? Oh, we both use Google Voice, too. So, I go looking for answers.

Starting the Move

So, in February, I backed up all of my e-mail, and paid another provider to do our e-mail hosting. They do two domains on one service price, which is great, but they don’t do long term storage (that’s on me.

In March, I removed secondary users from my domain services to make sure mine was the only account left on G Suite.

Other Services

That’s not to say I never give Google any money. I subscribe to YouTube, for an ad-free experience on any device. I have purchased several Android phone apps. Thing is, if my Google domain associated account just went away, would I have to re-purchase all my apps?

Around March, they started mentioning that they would have a way to transition a G Suite account onto a non-G Suite google account, in a “watch this space” sort of way.

March turned to April, then to May, and eventually, the answer popped up, with only weeks before the original deadline.

Annoucement

The deadline is now 27 June. And, if you are really a personal user, click here, and we’ll continue serving you for free, as we have for over a decade.

Too Late, I Think

So, I’ve already moved my e-mail. I’ve already backed up everything on my Google Drive. I’ve been working, for weeks now, on moving all of my Google Blogs to a self-hosted solution (this here), and I threw this switch today.

Look, I prefer GMail to any other email solution, but I am not about to put my eggs BACK in that basket after having lived with the threat of them taking it away.

As of now, my G Suite legacy free edition still holds my Android account and apps, the phone number most folks know (Google Voice), and my YouTube account.

If the Android apps went away, I’d probably switch to an iPhone, as rebuying Apps is one of the biggest deterrents at this point.

This Blog

So, this blog is now hosted on twin redundant servers in my New York apartment living room. I have been working on it as blog.vollink.nyc for the last few weeks, and by the end of this long weekend, its primary home will fully switch to blog.vollink.com to give some extra time for anyone who still has stale DNS records poining to Google for the domain.

Old Blogs

There are several links from old blogs that are to broken photos and broken links. They were broken on Google’s blogger, too, due to link rot, and I have not taken the time to individually try to fix them. ’m not likely to try to revive these old things. The text has been preserved for blogs going all the way back to late 2007.